IBM Corp duly unveiled its heavily-delayed bottom-end RS/6000 Model 220 workstation – but while US pricing was much as expected, pricing in the UK was rather keener. There are five new RS/6000s – three desktop systems, the 220, 340 and 350, and two deskside systems, the 520H and 560. Prices go from under $7,000 to around $64,000 for full entry configurations. The Powerstation/Powerserver 220 uses a 33MHz version of the single-chip implementation of the Rios chip set. It comes with integrated Ethernet and SCSI interfaces and a new Power Gt1 entry graphics adaptor, with monochrome, grayscale or colour support. Performance measurements include a SPECmark rating of 25.9 and 6.5MFLOPS. It has 16Mb and the 19 monochrome diskless system is $6,345 – about the same as Hewlett-Packard Co charges for a 34 SPECmark system in the same configuration. A grayscale system with 160Mb disk is $7,185; the same with colour is $8,475. First ships are in March but volume will be in the second quarter. There are new FDDI and Block Multiplexer Channel adaptors for the RS/6000, supported by the new version of AIX. The company also announced the AIX Software Development Environment WorkBench/6000 framework product for software engineering, using Hewlett-Packard’s SoftBench. AIX SDE Integrator/6000 enables customers to integrate their Unix CASE tools into the framework. A new AIX XL C++ Compiler/6000, was also introduced. Planned availability dates are May and August. IBM also introduced the RISC-based IBM 6611 Network Processor, again long-awaited and its first multiprotocol bridge-router for consolidating data traffic from different types of local network on a single link. It runs MultiProtocol Networking Program software with support for Token-Ring and Ethernet and high-speed, wide area technologies such as Frame Relay, and supports the Open Shortest Path First standard. It supports TCP/IP, Systems Network Architecture, NetBIOS, AppleTalk, Internet Packet Exchange; DECnet Phase IV; and Xerox Services Internet Transport. The 6611 will be available in June and a future version will also support Advanced Peer to Peer Networking for SNA. The 6611 Network Processor can connect up to seven local or 12 remote IBM Token-Ring networks as a bridge, and can also work in conjunction with IBM’s Token-Ring Network Bridge Program to supplement existing bridges. The 6611 Model 140 with four slots has a base price of $10,000; the Model 170 with seven slots has a base price of $18,640. The new AIX NetView/6000 is $10,000 and $5,000 for End User Interface.
