In what appears to be a move to encourage 9370 and 4381 users to stay loyal to the 370 line and not defect to next week’s planned high-end AS/400 E models, IBM Corp yesterday added a new top-end Model 200 in the low-end rack-mounted 9221 family – the first ever dyadic processor in what used to be the 9370 line – and a new entry-level Model 180 in the air-cooled 9121 line. IBM also moved Summit deliveries forward one to four months – the 520, 640, 660, 740 and 860 are all available now; the 860 was set for June, the others next month. And it wants to shut the Summit door on tardy 3090 users that still haven’t made their decision to move up, by ending field-upgrades of 3090s to the models that lead to Summit, in September or December. The phase-out affects most Base to J, E to J, S to J, J to J conversions, and upgrades to T models – the foothills die in December, as do upgrades from Js and Ts to Summits. The new 9121 Model 180 can be upgraded to the 190 or 210 and is accompanied by the new Byte Channel Enhancement facility for all air-cooled frame processors which means that users can specify any eight parallel channels as byte channels. Out on April 24, with upgrades to 190s or 210s in June – really? People are going to put the new machine in and then decide after less than two months to upgrade it? The Escon Extended Distance Feature will be available on new orders in June. Pitched as an upgrade for 4381 and 3083 users, the Model 180 has eight times greater memory capacity at 512Mb and is rated at up to twice the performance of the 4381-90E; the CPU cycle is 15nS and it has a 32Kb cache. It costs $462,000 with 64Mb and eight channels. The new Model 200 dyadic rack machine will be out in the third quarter and is available as an upgrade from the 150 and 170, also in the third quarter. Commercial performance is comparable with that of the 4381-92E, and exceeds it in certain environments. It has 64Mb standard expandable to 256Mb and it has PR/SM standard. It takes up to 24 parallel or Escon channels with 10M-bytes per second transfer capability and unrepeated distances up to 12 miles. Up to six integrated input-output buses are also offered. It is $350,000. Going from a 150 is $141,000, from a 170, $69,000. Price to add PR/SM to 3090s is up typically by 25%, with PR/SM Feature A-Side and B-Side each going up 25% to $81,060.
