【Mitsubishi Electric】 MELCOM70 MX/5000 Series, MX/5000II Series

The MX5600, MX5700 and MX5800 super minicomputers from Mitsubishi Electric were high-end models in the MELCOM70 MX Series. They achieved high-performance and low power consumption by packing higher performance architecture into 20,000 gate and 11,000 gate CMOS VLSI. The MX5600 and MX5700 had arithmetic performance 3.3 times that of the MX/2600. They were equipped with a variable length 9-stage pipeline, an 80 megabyte/second high-speed bus, and a 256 kilobyte large-capacity cache memory. Overall processing capability was improved by increasing speed of double-precision arithmetic using a 64-bit arithmetic bus, and by using VLSI for the character/string processing which is frequently used in communications control and program development.

The MX/5600 was a desk-side cabinet model; the MX/5700 was a model with system expandability; and the MX/5800 was a model with a tightly coupled multiprocessor configuration. With the MX/5700 and MX/5800 it was possible to adopt a multi-computer configuration enabling coupling of a maximum of 4 CPUs having a maximum of 32 megabytes of common memory.

The MX/5600II, MX/5700II and MX/5800II increased the speed of single-precision and double-precision floating point arithmetic and mathematical function operations using newly developed floating point LSI, and CPU performance was improved by 25% over the MX/5600, MX/5700 and MX/5800. Disk capacity was also enhanced.

These machines were equipped with the OS60/UMX operating system, which integrated UNIX (System V + BSD extension) with a real-time operating system developed by Mitsubishi Electric. They also had complete upward compatibility of hardware and software with the MX Series.