IBM Corp says its RS/6000 customers have told it that price/performance is their key requirement and that moving AIX to Intel’s IA-64 architecture will only be attractive to them if prices are lowered and performance increased. IBM, which is currently enjoying some economies of scale having merged AS/400 and RS/6000 server manufacturing operations and using shared components across the lines, would likely lose some margin points on IA-64 boxes that would need to compete more aggressively with other Unix-on-IA-64 servers. It says it is still assessing at what point AIX-on-Intel becomes financially attractive. Meantime, IBM has taken steps to get its enterprise Unix business back on track following consolidated market research numbers which show IBM Corp’s lead in the overall Unix server market was cut to 1% in 1997. IBM, with a 20% share, is trailed by Sun and HP with 19%. IBM held a 21% share in 1996. Initial 1998 market numbers show IBM’s Unix server growth of 15% is some way behind Sun (58%) and HP (23%). IBM has cut prices of its one-to-12-way S70 RS/6000 server by 30% from $125,000 to $85,000 on a quad and cut memory prices by 37%. The S70 ‘Blackbird,’ currently IBM’s only 64-bit Unix server, now uses the second-generation RS64-II CPU, a variant of Northstar, the Apache follow-on design also used in the AS/400 where it’s called PowerPC A50. Other members of the RS/6000 line more dependent on floating-point performance – workstations and SP2s – will be made over with 64-bit Power3 (PowerPC 630) which uses IBM’s dual-FPU Muskie design and three integer processing units. It’s expected to perform 800 MFLOPS at 200MHz or some 21 SPECfp95, just behind the fastest current DEC Alpha and HP PA-RISC designs (CI No 3,464). A 24-way enabled Power3+ Pulsar is in the pipe for next year. What we don’t know is when IBM will get a fully-fledged 64-bit AIX out the door. It didn’t want to tell us. AIX 4.3.1 has enough 64-bit functionality to be branded with the 64-bit Unix 98 specification, but it still has a 32-bit kernel. That means that much of AIX is running in 32-bit mode on the 64-bit PowerPC, slowing it down. Sun’s Solaris also has a 32-bit kernel but that’s being fixed in its upcoming 2.7 release or whatever that gets productized as. IBM claims AIX can operate in 32-bit or 64-bit modes and can support more memory than conventional 32-bit kernels like Solaris. HP’s HP-UX require separate 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. IBM says RS/6000 enterprise sales in first six months of the 1998 are ahead of expectations and that the new Power3 systems help it bounce back in the towards the end of the year.
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