🚀 go-pugleaf

       On Wednesday, March 25, Gould, Inc. announced via world-wide
       satellite down-link the first of their new super
       -minicomputers, the NP1.  The NP1 is the first of a new
       architecture from Gould, called the NPL series, that brings
       ultra-high performance to minicomputers at price performance
       factors well below the current industry.

       The NP1 is an ECL, gate-array processor sitting on a very
       fast bus (154 megabytes per second). With 2 cpu's on the
       same bus, coupled with a math accelerator unit, it does 12
       MIPS sustained at a base price of about $400,000. With a
       multiple, coupled bus option, 8 cpu's can co-exist for close
       to 100 MIPS, addressing 2 gigabytes of 54 nanosec memory.

       A more apt description for this "fire-breather", as Gould
       likes to call their computers, is "mini-supercomputer".
       Indeed, the new NP1 has a special link that allows 100
       megabytes/second access to a Cray. All this sitting in a
       fairly-rugged standard air-cooled cabinet not much bigger
       than a large filing cabinet. Of course, being the "old
       battery" company that Gould is, you can hang as much un-
       interruptible battery power on it as you want; and it has a
       built-in micro-processor for environmental control.

       Unix is THE operating system, complete with Bell, Berkeley,
       and the real-time extensions that Gould has pioneered in the
       real-time world.  A full complement of network connectivity,
       compilers for all the major languages, and a VME bus offer
       users almost anything they could ever want.

       Gould is betting their entire Computer Systems division on
       this architecture; expecting the NPL line to be 20% of their
       1988 revenues, and then the majority of their business in
       the 1990's. It should be interesting indeed to watch this
       development vs. HP's similar full-scale jump into RISC
       architecture (Gould's new line is not RISC); not to forget
       the parallel process architectures coming on soon.

       While it's too early to see if it's RISC or no risk, or
       both, one thing is clear, we are seeing 3 major developments
       here. One, Unix is becoming an industry standard; two,
       real-time Unix is here; and three, price per MIP is dropping
       exponentially. Probably, the only thing holding back such
       beasts from eating mainframes alive in the commercial market
       is that the secondary hardware markets (i.e. fast drives;
       higher-speed access methods, such as fiber WANS; and
       robotized cartridge handling; etc.) and software markets
       (expert systems; improved database file structures; and
       standardized window interfaces) just haven't kept up with
       the fast moving central processor technology.

           So what's new !

	The opinions above are the author's alone; any similarity to
	management, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

   Tom Helton			Support Group
   ..{ihnp4}!	| | |\ | | \/   Southwestern Bell Telephone Co.	
  sw1e!uusgth	|_| | \| | /\   One Bell Ctr 24W5, StL, MO 63101	
-- 
   Tom Helton			Support Group
   ..{ihnp4}!	| | |\ | | \/   Southwestern Bell Telephone Co.	
  sw1e!uusgth	|_| | \| | /\   One Bell Ctr 24W5, StL, MO 63101