Interaction of VLSI technology progress with minicomputer product development

This paper presents the interaction of VLSI technology progress with future minicomputer product development over the next five years. The beginning portion of the paper demonstrates how VLSI trends in both cost and performance constitute a technology push generating secondary trends that constrain the direction in which minicomputer product development can proceed. Since a minicomputer system consists basically of a CPU, a primary memory, and an I/O subsystem, the interaction of VLSI technology with each of these subsystems is also discussed.