The Amdahl 470V was a family of large mainframe computers designed by Amdahl Corporation and manufactured in partnership with Fujitsu. The design was plug compatible with IBM's System/370 series machines, but offered higher performance at a lower cost. The line was officially announced in September 1974, and it remained Amdahl's primary product into the 1980s.
The first machine in the series was the V/6, aimed at IBM's highest-end model, the 370 Model 168. The first installation was at the Goddard Space Flight Center in June 1975. The V/6 ran about 1.5 times as fast as the Model 168, and about 2 times as fast as the Model 165 it replaced at Goddard. The systems were also one-third the size of the Model 168 and were air-cooled, making them significantly simpler to install and operate than the water-cooled IBM systems; the system at Goddard was installed and commissioned in days instead of weeks. The V/6 was also sold in Japan starting in 1976 by both Fujitsu and Hitachi, where it was known as the M-190 and ran non-IBM operating systems like OSIV that provided backward compatibility with older Japanese mainframe designs.
The release of the 470 was initially ignored by IBM as it was believed Amdahl could not make a profit selling only a CPU. When 470 sales started rapidly increasing, IBM responded in March 1977 with the IBM 3033, which would have performance similar to the V/6 and would be roughly half the size of the Model 168. Amdahl responded the same month by announcing the low-end V/5 and midrange V/7, allowing them to cover the entire 370 family. The 3033 was a huge success, so much so that IBM could not deliver them fast enough and pushed some deliveries back into 1980. Amdahl responded in October 1978 by announcing the high-end V/8, even faster than the 3033. This drove some customers to cancel their 3033 orders and move to the V/8 instead.
Design of a replacement series began in 1979, with Fujitsu favoring multiprocessor systems while Gene Amdahl wanted to produce more powerful single processors. When Fujitsu took over management control, Amdahl left the company in 1979 to form Trilogy Systems. The new multiprocessor systems were announced in 1980 as the Amdahl 580. New entries in the 580 series replaced models in the 470 until the switchover was complete by the mid-1980s.
History ASC IBM introduced its first supercomputer, the IBM 7030 Stretch, in May 1961. They had to withdraw it from the market when tests at the launch customer, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, demonstrated it had very poor real-world performance. Almost immediately, IBM organized two development projects, Project X at the IBM Poughkeepsie Laboratory and Project Y at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Project X was tasked with designing a machine that would run 10 times as fast as Stretch, while Y was to be 100 times faster.
At the same time, IBM was designing its new mainstream system, with the underlying concept that it would allow any program to run on a range of machines from small office systems to top-end supercomputers. Project X was redirected to form the high-end of this lineup, and would emerge as the System/360 Model 91. Gene Amdahl had been a major driving force during the creation of the System/360 machines in the early 1960s, and he became known as the "father of the 360". The 360 would go on to be one of the most successful mainframe computer designs in history, cementing IBM's place as the number one computer vendor. Amdahl had only taken on the 360 project after IBM agreed to allow him to return to the west coast after five to seven months. That did not turn out; he stayed on the east coast for a total of four years during the 360 effort. With no immediate projects that interested him, he left to teach at Stanford University for a term.
During this period he was named an IBM Fellow which allowed him to work on any project that interested him. Around the same time, IBM decided to move the Project Y effort, now known as the IBM ASC to a new office in Menlo Park, near Stanford. Amdahl soon joined the ASC project. ASC was designing a machine dedicated to high-performance scientific tasks, and therefore, unlike Project X, it did not use the System/360 architecture. Shortly after joining, Amdahl began agitating for the idea of using the ideas being developed for ASC as the basis of a much faster 360. This angered ASC's management, who banished him and assigned an unruly employee to be his only staff. The two then developed the faster 360 and began telling everyone else in the company about it.
This process eventually led to a "shootout" between the two concepts. Amdahl was able to demonstrate that one could build a machine that would offer about 10% less performance than the baseline ASC but with only one-half the complexity and cost. Whether this is true remains debated to this day, but it did convince management, and the original ASC was killed in favor of Amdahl's ASC/360. The design was complete by 1969, at which time Amdahl outlined a plan for three machines, the original ASC/360, a simpler system roughly the performance, and an even smaller machine about . Due to the improvements in the design, even the smallest machine would still be faster than the fastest member of the existing 360 lineup. Management rejected the plan, and Amdahl responded by suggesting they simply shut down the lab, which they did.
New concept While all of this was happening, in July 1969, in large part due to ongoing anti-trust investigations, IBM announced they would be releasing all of their earlier software into the public domain and all future software sales would be separate line items instead of bundled with their systems. This included the growing list of operating systems (OSes) for the 360s. Amdahl realized this meant that someone could build a 360-compatible machine and then buy the OS for it. IBM would not be allowed to stop them or they would immediately be attacked on anti-trust grounds.
Amdahl began thinking about a design using a simplified version of the ASC's physical packaging to make what he believed would be a much less expensive system. ASC had been attempting to package everything as tightly as possible using newly emerging chip manufacturing techniques. Amdahl noted that the majority of hardware failures were in the chips, and that by packing them so tightly it made it difficult to replace a broken component. He developed the idea of a less dense packaging that would make interconnections between them easier to build. To make up for the larger size this would normally require, the chips themselves would have about 100 gates on them, instead of the more typical 30.
They would then make up for the lower density by highly automating the production and assembly using individual circuit boards with a small number of components on them. Unlike the high-end 360 models which were also densely packed and had to be water-cooled, these systems would offer even better performance while being air-cooled. This would make them less costly to operate, as well as much smaller, saving the customers so much on infrastructure and operational costs that they would be able to sell their systems are roughly the same price as IBM and still be highly competitive and profitable.
In early 1970, Amdahl told management that he would be leaving and that he planned to set up a company to produce 360-compatible systems. When he left, the president of his division gave him the advice that there was no money in high-end machines. Amdahl was convinced the problem was not part of the computers themselves, but part of IBM's business model. IBM's whole sales pitch was that you could triple performance for double the cost. In order for the bottom line to generate the desired profits, the lower-end machines had to have a certain price. This fixed the price of the mid-range and high-end machines, and the resulting price point for the high-end was too low to be profitable. This problem simply didn't exist if there was only a single machine in the lineup, all that mattered is whether you could built it profitably at whatever price point you selected. If IBM tried to match that price, and wanted to maintain their tiered pricing, they would be forced to lower the price of the lower-end systems, which made most of their money. He felt they were trapped by their strategy, which was invisible to them.
At first, IBM did not take this threat seriously because they did not believe such a business could generate a profit given that much of their own income was from peripherals and software, and all of that would still be going to IBM. Also, unknown to Amdahl, they were also working on new systems that would soon be announced as System/370 that offered some of the same size and cooling advantages.
At first, Amdahl had considerable trouble raising capital for the same reasons, as the venture firms felt there was no way anyone could compete with IBM. RCA had spent millions developing and marketing their Spectra 70 series of 360-compatible designs, and had yet to make a profit General Electric and Xerox were also in the mainframe space, but all three companies gave up during the time Amdahl was looking for funding, selling their lines to smaller companies at a huge loss.
Amdahl managed to raise two million dollars, which was enough for the design phase, but funding for development and production could not be found. This changed due to Amdahl's longstanding relationship with Fujitsu's engineers. Fujitsu had its own line of mainframes that sold mostly in Japan and they had made no headway in other markets. They sent a team, including their head engineer, to meet with Amdahl's team, which included 22 other ASC alumni. After three days of intense meetings, their chief engineer finally stood up and said "That's enough, we're convinced."
Fujitsu agreed to invest five million dollars in the project. This prompted a surprise investment of another five million from Heinz Nixdorf. Concerned this might dilute their position, Fujitsu immediately invested another five million. Now fully capitalized, Amdahl Corporation was formally incorporated in 1971.
Some time in 1974 or '75, an anonymous paper circulated in Washington claiming that the Japanese and German investments in the new company was a way for those countries to gain access to the world-leading technology and take over the high-end computing field. This raised enough concern that Amdahl was called to Washington to explain himself. Amdahl pointed out that there was simply no other funding available in the US due to the overwhelming presence of IBM, and had they not invested in his company, they would invest in some non-US company and thus the US would lose the performance lead. He also noted that the arrangement with the Germans was just a sales arrangement, they had no interest in production outside white-labeling, while the Japanese were limited to certain performance levels that locked them out of the high end market. His arguments won the day. He maintained that the memo was written by IBM or one of its legal firms.
Development and release
The original concept was to use a standardized circuit board with a five-by-five grid where individual components could be placed. The wiring between them was automatically laid out by a program running on the small IBM 1130 industrial computer. These boards would then be then mass-produced and the components assembled into them. During the design phase the boards were redesigned to be slightly larger, six-by-seven, but the concept was otherwise unchanged.