IBM, in its artless IBM way, may have carefully crippled the RS/6000 when it comes to running multi-user business applications supporting X Window stations if talk on the Street – Wall that is – emanating from Merrill Lynch & Co can be substantiated: Merrill has some applications that it wants to put up on Unix servers supporting X-stations, and word out of the house is that the RS/6000 is not showing up well in the benchmarks; the problem seems to be that while the machine with the vector graphics accelerator is extremely impressive, when it comes to pixel-by-pixel graphics used to put up windowed applications for spreadsheets and such, the raw performance of the RS/6000 CPU is dissipated when a large number of X terminals need to be supported – but then most IBMers will tell you that the thing is intended primarily as an engineering workstation and not for running commercial applications.
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