IBM Corp yesterday duly introduced the rack-mounted RS/6000 Powerserver 970 and the 970E model, which is what the thing is called when it is upgraded from a 930, 950 or 950E, killing off the 930 in the process. It comes with a new 0.5 micron four-level metallisation CMOS CPU clocked at 50MHz which has a 32Kb on-chip cache, four times the size of the existing one. The speed of the Micro Channel is doubled to 80M-bytes per second and the box has integrated SCSI port and supports an option of an additional eight full slots for a total of 16 Micro Channel slots. Base disk capacity is 2.7Gb using two 1.37Gb drives and maximum disk storage capacity increased to 132Gb with attachment of up to four 7202 Model 900 Expansion Racks. The 930, 950 and 950E can be field-upgraded with the new processor board and all the fixed disks and most other media devices can be carried across. A maximum of eight 64-Port Asynchronous Controllers are supported on each input-ouput board and up to eight four-port Multiprotocol Communications Controllers. Up to four sets of four sets of Fibre Distributed Data Interface Adaptors can be configured per system. The Powerserver 970E requires a minimum of 64Mb memory, so people upgrading may need to order more. Maximum is 512Mb.The 970 costs $94,500 and $833 a month maintenance from June 26.Upgrades are $51,500 from a 930 and $34,500 from a 950 or 950E.IBM also has new 1Gb and 1.37Gb disk drives for the RS/6000, $4,800 and $5,480 respectively, as well as an M-Video Capture Adaptor at $2,250, a new Ethernet transceiver converter for connection to twisted-pair cable networks at $280; the 9333 disk subsystem is now available on the 340 and 350E. There is also a new release of AIX, 3.2.1, which consists of enhancements that are separately and optionally installed. The enhancements include support for new hardware, new printers and functional enhancements, which can be added without reinstalling 3.2.0. IBM also no longer intends to support NeXT Computer Inc’s NeXTstep Release 2 on AIX/6000 or AIX PS/2 machines.
