The one big surprise in IBM’s RISC System/6000 announcement yesterday was that the entry model in the line is priced at from $7,475, making the entire family much more competitive than had been expected with rival offerings from the likes of Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard Co. The line consists of Powerstation and Powerserver models – Power stands for Performance Optimisation With Enhanced RISC architecture. As expected, there are desktop, deskside and rack-mounted units. AIX Version 3 for the RS/6000 is designed to exploit the architecture and it includes enhanced system management facilities, enhanced virtual memory management, on-line hypertext documentation; enhanced physical disk space management; and network install facilities. The company has also bought Network Computing Devices Inc technology to implement the Xstation 120 X station. There are the expected two user interfaces – AIXwindows Environment/6000 with the AIXwindows, graphical user interface and toolkit based on OSF/Motif; the Enhanced X-Windows version of the X Window System; Display PostScript support; and a Graphics Library compatible with that of Silicon Graphics Inc; and the AIX NextStep Environment/6000 graphical user interface and programming environment for Powerstations only, designed to be compatible with the application programming interface of NeXT Inc’s NeXTStep; it includes Workspace Manager, Interface Builder and Objective-C compiler. There are 16 RS/6000 System Packages, consisting of a preconfigured system with options. At the bottom of the line, the Powerstation/Powerserver 320 is a multi-user, multitasking desktop machine with high speed floating-point processor and concurrent instruction execution. Multiple distributed input-output processors are used to enhance system performance. It has 20MHz CPU with 8Kb instruction, 32Kb data caches, 8Mb memory, 120Mb disk, 1.44Mb floppy, four Micro Channel slots, two serial and one parallel ports, at $7,475 with availability in the second quarter. Memory goes to 32Mb, disk to 640Mb. There 520 and 530 are deskside systems with 25MHz processor at from $21,475 for the workstation, $36,000 for the server, also second quarter. The Powerserver 540 comes with 64Mb memory and 640Mb disk standard at $88,695 in the third quarter. The Powerstation 730 is the specialist three-dimensional graphics model at from $67,190 in the fourth quarter. Top of the line is the Powerserver 930 19 rack-mounted member of the family at from $59,535 in the third quarter. Details of the the UK launch are in page three, inside.
