Unisys had hoped the more successful Intel server sellers such as Compaq and Dell would carry the load selling the CMP systems, but the company now is concentrating chiefly on direct sales with a boost from smaller sales partners such as Fujitsu services subsidiary ICL and Hitachi, Krempasky said. Compaq announced its plan to sell the CMP systems two years ago, and HP followed suit in September 2000. The deals fell through in spring 2001. But Unisys still got some mileage out of the sales deals with HP and Compaq, said Chas Weber, director of business development at Unisys, in an earlier interview. "The advantage to doing it, even if they dropped out, was a lot of market exposure," he said. The ES7000 servers have commonly been selling for $480,000 with an average of 22 processors, Weber said. About 600 CMP systems have been sold so far, Krempasky said. Unisys isn't the only one with hopes riding on the CMP systems. Microsoft also is banking on the products to help carry Windows into high-end environments where Unix and mainframes currently prevail leaving Windows to play only a supporting role. Windows currently is most often used on lower-end systems with four or fewer CPUs. That's where Dell's server line and customer base is strongest. The CMP system arrived in the nick of time for Microsoft's Windows 2000 version, its top-end operating system designed to run on servers with as many as 32 CPUs. Unisys and Microsoft are working to market and improve each other's products. Gradually, they're making progress, said Mark Feverston, vice president of Unisys server programmes. Initially, systems typically were sold with 16 processors divided into two eight-CPU partitions, but now "we're starting to see more single 16-way partitions," he said. And the city of Minneapolis is even running Windows in a single 32-CPU partition. Though the new Xeon chips come with Intel's "hyper-threading" feature, which lets a single chip act somewhat like two, that feature won't be enabled initially, Feverston said. The new ES7000/200 systems run about 20 percent faster than the older models, but Unisys is keeping the price the same. The CMP systems cost anywhere from about $100,000 to $1m, Feverston said.
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