Last week, analysts heard rumors that IBM Corp was up to something toward the end of this month regarding its future Power5 processors and the Squadron servers that use them.

However it now appears as though IBM is not going to be announcing the actual servers using the Power5 processors at that time; and the exact time that it will do so is still largely a secret. Rumors have been all over the map when it comes to actual machines using the Power5 chips, which are also known internally as the GR processors.

About this time last year, the scuttlebutt was that midrange Power5-based machines, based on a single, eight-way multichip module (MCM) and aimed at the Unix market, would debut around March 2004, maybe in April 2004. Then later in 2003 that date had slipped to April or May 2004. As IBM started talking about technical details of the Power5s in the summer of 2003, some people at IBM would only confirm that there were not going to be any Power5 in the first quarter of 2004, and still others would only say that the machines would come out in the first half of 2004 or mid-2004.

Some of the business partners who have been too busy trying to stay in business rather than to listen to the ground for rumors, said that they had heard none of these rumors and that, as far as they knew, IBM was not expected to launch a refreshed iSeries line until late summer or the fourth quarter of 2004.

As with the past couple of generations of Power4 servers, it may turn out that IBM leads with the pSeries line and the iSeries line doesn’t get new hardware until the Power5 chip is fully ramped. There’s only one problem with this: OS/400 V5R3, which is required for the Power5 chip, is ready, and AIX 5L 5.3, which is needed to run Unix on Power5, is not ready.

In fact, the word on the street is that IBM will launch OS/400 V5R3 before the end of April. The odds favor this edition of OS/400 being supported on machines with 64-bit PowerPC, Power4, and Power5 processors, which share common architectural elements. And now that IBM has severed the hard link between iSeries hardware and OS/400 editions, with the repackaging announced in January 2003, with the advent of OS/400 Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition, IBM can sell new OS/400 licenses to customers with existing PowerPC iron and early generations of Power4 hardware and make that money, even if there is no new Power5 hardware to sell.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire