By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue will roll out its revamped RS/6000 server and workstation lineup on September 14 and all the top brass at the RS/6000 division will split up and head to either San Francisco or New York to tell the world about the new machines and their software. Industry analysts and consultants will be briefed separately on the new RS/6000s in Boston on September 9.
First and foremost among the new RS/6000s is the S80 Condor server. IBM has already said that the Condor, which will offer from six to 24 processors in an SMP configuration, will offer about three times as much processing power as the current twelve-way Blackbird S7A server. The current S7A uses 64-bit 262MHz Northstar PowerPC processors, which are a shrink of the 125MHz Apache processor first announced in AS/400e servers in August 1997 and then in the RS/6000 S70 Raven the following October.
The original intent for both the Raven servers, as well as their AS/400e variants, was to provide eight-way SMP clustering through ganging up two four-way Apache cards, much as Intel is doing by marrying two of its four-way Pentium III Xeon motherboards to create the Profusion eight-way servers. But IBM was able to move its twelve-way clustering project (ganging up three four-ways together in an SMP using a proprietary supercomputer crossbar switch) forward by a year and used it in the Raven servers first rather than the Blackbirds as originally planned. Since that time, however, IBM has not extended the SMP capabilities of its high-end RS/6000 SMP servers, and has fallen behind Hewlett-Packard Co, which offers 32-way servers in the V2500 line, and Sun Microsystems Inc, which offers 64-way servers in the Starfire line. With the Condors, the basic building block is a six-way SMP Pulsar processor card, and this time IBM is lashing together four of these cards to get up to 24 processors in the cluster. For more details, see Barbed Wire, below.
Also coming on September 14 is the Pizzazz thin server, which is widely expected to be the smallest RS/6000 workstation, the 43P model 150, skinnied down for the ISP market. IBM says that Pizzazz will use a 32-bit PowerPC processor and run either Linux or AIX. The 43P model 150 uses IBM’s 375MHz PowerPC 604e chip, and this is likely what IBM will put inside of it. But IBM also makes faster copper-based PowerPC 750 processors for Apple, and it could plunk one of these on the motherboard instead. The 466MHz PowerPC 750 has a SPECint95 rating of 21.8, about 40% more integer power than the 375MHz PowerPC 604e, which has a 15.9 SPECint95 rating. The PowerPC 750 is also considerably smaller than the 604e and dissipates about half the heat – important considerations for thin servers. Pizzazz is likely to include bundles of Apache, Sendmail and other open source software commonly used by ISPs and ASPs.
