IBM aims for world chip domination
IBM declares that it is intent on world domination of the chip market by the end of the century, and so will make the new processors available to other manufacturers on the open market to encourage take-up in as many areas as possible. Compaq Computer Corp is already thought to be testing PowerPC 601-based personal computers: IBM expects announcements by the end of this year or during the first quarter of 1994. It promises to release a System Reference Platform specification for designing architecturally-compliant hardware, and says it will provide interested parties with support chips, processor boards, subsystems, memory, Video RAM and the like. It is trying to make it cheap and easy for third parties to convert to the new chips by supplying them with tools – it claims it has already signed up over 40 independent software vendors to this end via the PowerOpen Association as well as 11 Macintosh vendors including Microsoft Corp, Aldus Corp and Adobe Systems Inc. IBM wants all of the major 32-bit operating systems up on the PowerPC – those currently committed are AIX, Macintosh System 7, Sun Microsystems Inc’s Solaris, Taligent and WorkPlace OS – and eventually to migrate to 64-bit operating systems. The new OS/2 – version 3.0 – should also be included on the compliancy list during the first half of next year.
Three high-end machines use Power2 RISC
At the high end, IBM has three new machines, using its Power2 eight-chip uniprocessor, which is said to provide comparable performance to a supercomputer – in fact, because the US Department of Commerce has classified the new boxes as supercomputers, they are required to carry a special export licence. The are the 590, UKP61,373, and 58H – UKP75,641 – both October 22; and the Powerserver 990, October 29 at UKP120,578. The 58H is a mid-range desk-side system with a 55MHz Power2; the 590 is described as the highest performing RS/6000 deskside system ever and uses a 66MHz processor. Each has 64Mb of memory, 2Gb of disk, 256Kb of data cache, 32Kb of instruction cache, and a CD-ROM drive. They are targeted at users wanting to replace their mainframes with distributed database servers, running general business and commercial applications, and are also suitable for engineers and scientists needing three-dimensional workstations. Existing RS/6000 570 users can upgrade to either, although current 580 users can go only to the 590. The Powerserver 990 is rack-mounted and uses a 71.5MHZ Power2 chip, which IBM claims is the highest performing uniprocessor in the ind-ustry – the chip originally ran at 66MHz, but the clock has been wound up. Aimed at technical numerical-in-tensive areas such as analytical simulation, it runs at 131 MFLOPS – against the previous top-end RS/6000s at 38 MFLOPS, and DEC’s Alpha at 42 MFLOPS. The Powerserver 990 comes with 256Kb of data cache, a 32Kb ins-truction cache, 128Mb of memory, 4Gb disk, a CD-ROM drive and battery back-up. Performance can be further enhanced using IBM’s new High Availability Cluster Multiprocessing/6000 software, which enables up to four machines to be clustered. All existing 900 series users will be able to upgrade their machines to the new model, IBM says.
Plenty of goodies waiting just around the corner
Next up in the RS/6000 line will be a new range of Power Personal systems, including portables, desktops, and the notebook IBM is jointly developing with Tadpole Technology Plc. The last will run at 50MHz, have 64Mb of RAM, two PCMCIA slots, an SCSI interface and an external battery pack lasting four hours. It will support ISDN, AppleTalk and Ethernet and weigh 5 lbs 8 oz. These products will be out in the first quarter of 1994, and are targeted at the low cost, high volume market as an alternative to, not a replacement for Intel Corp personal computers – the Power Personal Systems division is responsible for all such offerings. The Advanced Workstations & Systems division, conversely, looks after mid-range systems, and it is here that the work with Compagnie des Machines Bull S
A on a symmetric multiprocessing machine is being carried out. This should be out by mid-1994, and will typically have four to eight CPUs. It will cost between $20,000 and $150,000, but IBM plans to link multiprocessors machines together to form a distributed cluster. Next on the power scale come systems that have a shared memory cluster. These are aimed at IBM’s current mainframe users and will be developed out of its existing Power 4 four-way Unix mainframe. Power 4s have been adopted by about 40 IBM customers for experimental purposes, and will not be made commercially available. Symmetric Multiprocessing Clusters will be used either as stand-alone units or coupled to primarily MVS-based mainframes. They will cost between $100,000 and $1m, and will emerge as the first members of the Power Parallel family, jointly developed by IBM’s Advanced Workstation unit and its Enterprise Systems division. The two are also working on a scalable parallel system, based on the high-availability SP1 supercomputer, which was announced in February and released September 17. IBM says the idea behind such a machine was to drive down the cost of mainframes. SP1 will initially be aimed at the technical and scientific market, and between 60% and 70% of early users are found in either research laboratories or universities – the rest come from the gas and oil industry. The machine currently has more than 60 parallel and serial applications either written for it or in development. But IBM intends to try and move into the commercial market with its new parallel machine, and so is currently working with such vendors as Oracle Corp and Sybase Inc to develop suitable applications. SP1 sports between eight and 64 RIOS1 processors and offers performance of between one and eight gigaFLOPS. During the first half of next year though, customers will be able to upgrade to the Power2 chip, which IBM claims will approximately double SP1’s peak performance. The new scalable parallel system, conversely, will have hundreds of processors, run both serial and parallel applications under a single system image, and be scalable from GigaFLOPS to TeraFLOPS. It will be out in 1995 or 1996, costing from $200,000 to $10m.
AIX 4.0 with 64-bit addressing for 1994
Beyond AIX 3.2.5, IBM plans to introduce a PowerOpen-compliant AIX 4.0 in the first quarter of 1994 based upon the symmetric multiprocessing kernel being developed in conjunction with Compagnie des Machines Bull SA. The system software will have 64-bit addressing and be compatible with all existing 32-bit applications. The kernel will be adjusted to make it suitable for parallel systems. Multimedia and object extensions will be added in subsequent releases as the result of the company’s work with Apple Computer Inc on the Kaleida and Taligent projects respectively. Taligent may eventually replace AIX as IBM’s base Unix operating system. The group also expects to see the first PowerOpen application binary interface-compliant software coming out by the year-end. – Catherine Everett
