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In December 1967, Amdahl began calling people within IBM to tell them about the new design. Kolsky was sent to meet with Amdahl to get a more detailed description of the proposed design.{{sfn|Conway|2011|p=20}} This proved interesting to management, who arranged a complete project review in March 1968 under the leadership of Carl Conti from IBM Poughkeepsie. Amdahl presented performance estimates based on hand-calculated cycle counts. Conti accepted Amdahl's arguments that on integer benchmarks, the AEC/360 would be up to five times as fast as the ASC-1, it would be up to 2.5 times slower on floating-point, and the complex branching system of ASC seemed to offer 10 to 20% at best and could be adapted to the AEC if desired. But a key point made by Conti was that if the ASC system was so reliant on the compilers for its performance, moving that code to some other machine could result in far different outcomes and that could be considered a disadvantage.{{sfn|Smotherman|Sussenguth|Robelen|2016|p=67}}
The most serious blow to the ASC was the continued success of the S/360. In January 1968, [[NASA]] had taken delivery of a 360 Model 95, which IBM described as "the fastest, most powerful computer now in user operation."{{sfn|Smotherman|Sussenguth|Robelen|2016|p=67}} Another problem was that Max Paley
Many of the retrospective articles on the ASC project note that the original machine would have been a world leader. Conway notes that "In hindsight, it is now recognized that had the ACS-1 been successfully built, it would have been the premier supercomputer of the era."{{sfn|Conway|2011|p=20}} The decision to cancel the original design rested mostly on the cycle counts which had not been tested as the simulator she had developed had not been ported.{{sfn|Conway|2011|p=20}} Likewise, Amdahl's claim of an 8 nanosecond cycle was accepted by the Conti review although Mark Smotherman suggests it is not realistic.{{sfn|Smotherman|Sussenguth|Robelen|2016|p=67}}
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