Informed gossip in the US has IBM offering faster memories as an option on the forthcoming F series of 3090 mainframes, so that the processors should improve performance about 10% while the memories could add another 10% to 15% performance boost, perhaps more on the biggest configurations: the move could persuade users to upgrade their memory as they do other peripherals, and might mean that users could get a very significant improvement in performance by field-upgrading their Es to Fs without adding processors; the Fs are expected to be announced at prices a little higher than the present price of the Es – but a 10% cut is expected on the latter at the time of the F launch.