Designer Frank Soltis perceives two major benefits in moving the AS/400 line onto PowerPC architecture chip sets – quite apart from the obvious cost-performance and development gains: first off he sees great potential in having the same processor type acting as central CPU and input-output processor – he points out that currently the majority of input-output processors in the AS/400 are Motorola Inc 68020 devices – and that the boxes are crammed with the commodity parts. Make the whole lot PowerPC-based and the way is opened for all kinds of fun, says Soltis, creating the possibility of migrating some application or operating system code out to the peripheral processors: imagine, he says, multiple disk arrays, each controlled by its own PowerPC – got it? Now imagine a complex database search: instead of being handled centrally, he suggests that key parts of the operating system database code could be replicated and run on the input-output controllers, introducing a degree of true parallelism to database access – It is easy to do he says – and it is one reason why he is committed to keeping database tightly integrated with hardware. The second major advantage to adoption of PowerPC is software portability: there have been a number of conflicting reports in the US press over the past few weeks about IBM’s intentions of running Unix, OS/2 or Windows NT on the AS/400 in recent months, and sure ’tis no wonder, since the truth is very complex, and the answer is yes and no.
