IBM Corp says that it has a RISC co-processor for the AS/400 in the laboratory at its Rochester, Minnesota base – but has not yet worked out what it might decide to use the thing for: the most glaring omission in the AS/400 is anything that does sums fast for work like spreadsheet calculation. In a wide-ranging run-down on the state of play in the AS/400 world, IBM’s Tony Hill, in charge of Application Business Systems in the UK, told a conference organised by System Software Associates Ltd that while the entry-level price for the AS/400 was currently UKP25,000, this would fall to UKP10,000, perhaps as soon as the end of the year. He also suggested that while the Model D80 delivered 10 MIPS (yes IBM does use MIPS when it suits its case), before 1992 there would be four-way multiprocessing and that within six years, n-way multiprocessing would lead to a capability of 200 MIPS at the top. IBM reckons that the aggregate worldwide base of AS/400s, System 36s and 38s is 500,000 – with an average of two per site. Star performer in marketing the AS/400 is IBM Japan but the biggest single customer is in the US with 5,000 machines, soon to rise to 8,000. He claimed controversially that in commercial applications the AS/400 delivers superior price-performance to the RS/6000 and other open systems – failing to point out that pressure for price attrition is much higher in open systems. All manufacturers are making their operating systems Posix 1003.1-compliant – no business from Uncle Sam otherwise, and IBM is doing the business for the AS/400. In the ooh-ahh department, he revealed that IBM had filed 34 new patents on AS/400 technology.
