New Chip Modules Help DEC Cut Size of New VAX Mainframe
 
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
BOSTON (Microbytes Daily News Service) --- Digital Equipment
Corp.'s new multichip-packaging technology made its commercial
debut in the new VAX mainframe computer announced here yesterday.
DEC's new packaging design, developed as a means of building
denser circuit boards and first publicly discussed a month ago
enables the company to put the new VAX 9000's heart on a planar
module measuring 24 x 24 inches. While this is a whale of a board
to personal computer users, it's but a porpoise by mainframe
standards. DEC says its new VAX is about one-third the size of
competitors' (read IBM's 3090) machines while providing
comparable computing capabilities.
 
The planar module holds 13 multichip units (MCUs), which are
about half the size of a cigar box, and the whole thing makes up
the VAX 9000's CPU. DEC says it has greatly reduced the
interconnect paths between chips on the MCU, thereby speeding up
the signals between circuits, thereby speeding up performance.
Because the MCU has "fewer components, fewer interconnects, there
are fewer points of failure," according to DEC vice president
Robert Glorioso.
 
The VAX 9000, DEC's first stab at making a mainframe, will come
with one to four CPUs. DEC claims low-end performance figures of
125 MFLOPS, 30 times faster than a VAX 11/780; with a new vector
processor added to the four-CPU model, DEC says performance peaks
at 500 MFLOPS, more than 100 times faster than an 11/780. The
air-cooled system can handle as many as 70 transactions per
second, the company says. The System Control Unit, or "high-speed
traffic cop" that directs data between processors, memory, and
I/0, can manage four simultaneous data transfers at 500M
bytes/second, DEC says; I/O throughput ranges from about 80M
bytes to 320M bytes/second.
 
"Sixty to 80 percent of VAX instructions can be executed in one
16-nanosecond cycle," according to Glorioso. The mainframe
is object-code compatible with older VAXen, so "6500 VAX
applications will run on the 9000 without recompiling," a DEC
official said.
 
Pricewise, the VAX 9000 is aimed at large companies and lottery
winners; prices go from $1.24 million to $3.92 million. The first
low-end models will start shipping in the middle of next year,
and the high-end models around the fourth quarter, DEC says.
 
Contact: Digital Equipment Corp., Maynard, MA 01754
 
                              --- D. Barker
 
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