By Timothy Prickett Morgan

The S80 may be the star of the revamped RS/6000 line from IBM Corp, but it is by no means the only important new hardware being launched today. There are also new Nighthawk Power3 High Nodes for SP servers, slightly faster Power3 chips for them and a new standalone technical server, the T70, based on these two technologies.

The Nighthawk SP nodes are follow-ons to the current Winterhawk Power3-based nodes that IBM debuted for the SPs back in February. The Winterhawks come with one or two 200MHz Power3 processors. The Nighthawks come with 2, 4, 6 or 8 of the new 222MHz Power3 processors, which should in themselves offer about 11% more processing power than the current Power3 chips. That would give it a SPECfp95 rating of 33.4 compared to the 200MHz Power3’s 30.1 rating. In terms of raw number crunching, the 200MHz Power3 could in theory crank out about 800 MFLOPS, with about 630 MFLOPS realized on benchmark tests. The new Power3 chip should be able to do about 700 MFLOPS on real technical applications. This may not be a big improvement, but that extra little bit helps offset SMP degradation on the Nighthawk node.

IBM says that the Nighthawks will support up to 16Gb of main memory – four times that in the Winterhawk nodes – and have eight times the memory bandwidth, which certainly helped those SMP ratios along, too. IBM will also allow customers to attach several hundred gigabytes of storage to a Nighthawk node using a new 3U, rack-mounted disk expansion unit that Big Blue will also be peddling with the Pizzazz B50 thin server (see separate story). This disk expansion unit will be able to hold ten UltraSCSI-2 disks with capacities ranging from 9.1Gb to 36.4Gb. Pricing for the Nighthawk node will be $184,000 for a two-way setup with 1Gb of memory, two 9.1Gb disks, an expansion unit and an SP switch. A fully configured eight-way Nighthawk with 16Gb of memory, two 18.2Gb disks plus appropriate expansion units and SP switches will cost $611,480. In a standalone configuration, the Nighthawk-based T70 technical server will cost from $188,630 for a base two-way model to $564,230 for a fully configured eight-way model.