By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sources familiar with IBM’s plans say that the company will enhance its midrange RS/6000 Unix server line with the addition of two new midrange boxes in the early part of the second half of 2000. IBM will first of all deliver an improved low-end Unix server in the F50/H50 class, presumably to be called the F60 and H60 if IBM’s naming conventions hold; the Fs are deskside servers, the Hs are rack-mounted servers. Sources say these new machines will offer three times the performance of the F50 and H50.
The F50 and H50 have from one to four of IBM’s old 32-bit PowerPC 604e processors and offer between 2,800 and 9,200 TPC-C transactions per minute of processing power. The follow-on machines would have to offer between 8,400 and 27,600 TPM of OLTP power, and it is quite clear that the current 450MHz Pulsar copper-based PowerPC processors (which are used in the high-end S80 Condor RS/6000 servers) are sufficient for the task.
That a uniprocessor Pulsar machine will pack that much punch begs the question though, just what is IBM going to offer customers who want a more modestly powered RS/6000? Presumably the F50s and H50s will be removed from its catalog. IBM could offer the so- called F60s and H60s with 64-bit Apache and Northstar processors (the 125Mhz and 262MHz predecessors to the 450MHz Pulsars) as options to get even lower-cost machines, but odds are IBM will instead spend its time trying to convince customers that they will need powerful Pulsar machines to support e-business and groupware applications.
Our sources also tell us that IBM will deliver a follow-on to the very popular H70 midrange server, which currently uses from one to four 340MHz Northstar processors and which has sold very well in 1999. This so-called H80 box, which is expected to offer up to eight processors per server, will presumably use IBM’s 450MHz Pulsar processors, but it could employ the forthcoming I-Star processors if IBM gets them out the door in time. All IBM has said is that it will ship processors that use the silicon-on- insulator CMOS-8S process before the end of 2000, and I-Star is reportedly the chip that will first use SOI. This chip was expected in AS/400s in February 2000, but IBM has pushed back that announcement until the second half of 2000, too.
By moving to the 450MHz Pulsar, IBM can push the performance of a four-way box up to about 23,000 TPM from the current 17,000 TPM in the H70; adding another four processors to the H80 will boost performance to about 41,000 TPM. The six-way S80 has about the same processing power that the eight-way H80 will apparently have because the S80 has much more memory and I/O bandwidth.
