Having cut prices across the board on the AS/400s, in what looked like an effort to fend off the challenge from its own RS/6000, IBM yesterday made matters worse for itself from a self-impact point of view by slashing prices on the Unix workstations and servers by up to 60% in a move seen as being a defensive effort to protect the machines from inroads threatened by Hewlett-Packard Co’s HP9000 Series 700 machines, currently the price-performance market leaders. The high-end Powerstation 550 was cut by 60% to $52,500, although it only just started shipping; the 950, not yet shipping, was cut by 35.5% to $94,500, and the new price includes 64Mb of memory against 32Mb previously and disk doubled to 1.7Gb. There are lesser cuts accompanied by improved basic configurations on the smaller models, and a new Fortran compiler is said to give 25% to 30% better performance in compute-intensive work.
