Observers fault our rendition of IBM Corp’s Pegasus multiprocessors, said to be positioned against Digital Equipment Corp’s Sable machines due out in April, for describing them as topping out at six PowerPC processors. They say IBM will start with one to four processors, later going up to eight. IBM is also working on a rack-mounted symmetric multiprocessing machine, said to be more powerful and expandable than Pegasus, which is due in the second half. Before this, at next month’s CeBit Hannover Fair and then again the following week at UniForum, the firm is expected to unveil new configurations of its SP1 Powerparallel systems, possibly the performance-doubling Power2 models promised last September for announcement this half. More details on the new Scalable AIX for symmetric multiprocessing, as it is being dubbed, include support for up to eight processors and new packaging that breaks out an entry client system, a personal productivity client – including Wabi Plus – network server, graphics server and large scale configurations. Meanwhile, IBM’s mainframe operating system with an open face, MVS Open Edition – or OpenMVS as its dubbed which will come with a Posix interface (Unix-style commands and utilities), is going to feature the Open Software Foundation Distributed Computing Environment and carry an X/Open Co Ltd XPG4 brand in a new release that is due to appear next quarter.
