IBM Corp’s RS/6000 division has launched the Model 40P workstation, the Power Personal Division’s top-end desktop rebadged. Priced at $4,000, the machine will only be available running AIX 4.1.1. In performance terms it straddles the current RS/6000 Model 250, at around half the cost. The 250 has a claimed SPECint rating of 62.6 and a SPECfp of 72.2, compared to 63.7 and 67.8 for the 40P. A PowerPC 604 upgrade, available next year, will enable it to leapfrog the older machine. The machine currently uses a PowerPC 601 processor running at 66MHz. It comes with 16Mb of memory expandable to 192Mb, and a 360Mb hard disk, expandable to 4Gb. It is the first Peripheral Component Interconnect bus-based RS/6000 and can be expanded via two PCI slots or three AT slots. The pricing is a hairy issue for IBM; at a UK briefing, officials acknowledged that there would have to be close price parity between the machine as an RS/6000 and in its Power Personal guise. This either means that next year’s Power Personals will come into the market at around the $4,000 mark or, more likely, IBM will cut prices with the launch of the machines destined to run OS/2 or Windows NT. Could it be that the delays at Power Personal have helped the RS/6000 arm by letting it bump up prices? However, IBM will not get it all its own way; Motorola Inc’s AIX desktops start at UKP3,300.
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