Resellers and IBM insiders have been talking to Midrange Systems and other US publications about IBM Corp’s forthcoming PowerPC-based System/36 upgrade: the machine is described as RISC-based AS/400 hardware that runs the SSP System Support Program operating system, and it is said to use a 64-bit processor. Since there is at present no 64-bit PowerPC, that suggests that the CPU will be something of a kluge. It runs SSP on top of a layer of microcode called the Systems Licensed Internal Code, which will be similar to the microcode in next year’s PowerPC AS/400s. But the latter will support both OS/400 and SSP in native mode, so users will be able to run either workload native, although presumably not concurrently. The paper says the machine, which it reckons will be called the AS/400 Advanced System 36, will be upgradable to AS/400 functionality next year although the initial chip will not be powerful enough to run OS/400, and it will be housed in an AS/400 Model 200 enclosure. The ability to upgrade to AS/400 is not likely to appeal to many 36 users, who are only being wooed with this new machine because they are so opposed to the idea of going to the AS/400 that they’d rather go Unix. The new SSP 7.1 is said to be an exact conversion of SSP 6.1 – with no significant additional functionality, so don’t look for things like TCP/IP. The US trade paper says the machine is at least twice as fast as the fastest System/36 and five times faster on some work. Transferring a workload is said to be trivial: simply load Data Link, connect the two machines over twinaxial cable and wait four to six hours, and all your software will trickle over. As to pricing, there is some disagreement: some say the box – with over 100Mb of memory and up to 5Gb of disk, will be aggressively priced, others say that it will cost more than the cheapest AS/400 models.
