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SCMP Reporter

ICL chose the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, for the world launch of its Pentium-based computer and range of personal computers (PCs).

  Mr Dennis Haines, ICL's president for Asia, speaking at the launch, said the new range would help the company achieve its aim of taking 12 per cent of the Asian PC market by 1995.

  In 1988, the company sold only 50,000 PCs worldwide, rising to 217,000 last year. The market now accounts for more than 50 per cent of its hardware sales.

  He said the PC market was becoming far more competitive with margins dropping all the time.

  ''We just have to learn the trick of selling low-margin products; if supermarkets can do it so can we.''    The company has recorded profits for the past 10 years and, with the exception of Unisys, was the only major computer manufacturer to make a profit last year.

  The keystone of the launch was ICL's Pentium-based TeamServer F5 - one of the first on the market.

   ICL has positioned its Pentium offer in the client-server market, highlighting the company's experience in systems' integration.

  Similarly, the company has put much of its new 486 line in the same market.

  The CXe, FX and MX lines now use RAID disk technology, for safer data storage.

  The FX 486/66, for example, is priced to be 27 per cent cheaper than its equivalent Pro-Signia competitor from Compaq, while the MX server uses symmetric multi-processing - four processors simultaneously execute functions and avoid bottlenecks found withasymmetric multi-processing.

  ''There is a substantial increase in demand for servers,'' said Mr Philip van Houtte, vice-president worldwide marketing for personal systems.

   ''Customers are saying can you make everything less expensive but give us the power we need.''    He said the new Pentium machine provided that solution, because the new processor was nearly twice as fast as the top 486DX chip currently available from manufacturer Intel.

  ''We bore in mind that, by 1995, indicators show that 50 per cent of applications will be for client server environments,'' he said.

  The F5 uses a dual bus architecture to take full advantage of the 64-bit processing power of the Pentium.

   It includes up to 16 kilobytes internal and 256 KB second level write back cache.

   The disk comes standard with four gigabytes of storage, expandable by a mass memory expansion unit.

  To improve its positioning as a client-server product, ICL has used the RAID standards, 0.1 and 5.

   These standards both improve the system's performance when writing to disk and when downloading to random access memory.

   Most significantly, RAID technology can rebuild data on to one of the array of disks if one falls.

  The F5 is US$6,000 for 8 MB RAM and 245 MB of hard disk.



ICL launches Pentium PCs