IBM Corp made scads of announcements in the RS/6000 arena yesterday, notably the first PowerPC-based nodes for the RS/6000 Scalable Powerparallel or SP systems, building 112MHz PowerPC 604s into monster symmetric multiprocessor 604 High Nodes with up to eight processors each with 1Mb L2 cache. Each node has 16 Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) slots, 64Mb to 2Gb RAM, 2Gb to 6.6Gb disk and one SCSI-2 and one Ethernet adapter. Up to 16 604 High Nodes – with a total of 128 CPUs – are supported in tall frame SP models, and they can be intermixed with current Wide and Thin nodes. The PowerPC nodes run AIX 4.1.2. Meantime, IBM’s High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP) software, which clusters up to eight RS/6000 server or SP nodes, now supports AIX 4.2.
PowerPC 604 servers
As well as the long-promised free PowerPC 604 upgrades for customers of its existing PowerPC 601 RS/6000 Models G30, J30 and R30, IBM has also introduced three new 112MHz PowerPC 604 models. Like their predecessors the G40, J40 and R40 are based upon the one-to-eight way MCA bus Escala system designed by Compagnie des Machines Bull SA and IBM, which IBM introduced in October 1994. The G40 minitower comes with one-to-four CPUs each with an optional 500Kb L2 cache, 64Mb to 1Gb RAM, 2.2Gb to 13Gb disk and five free MCA slots. It costs from $26,000 as a uniprocessor, $30,000 as a two-way. To get to four-ways costs an additional $10,000. The J40 deskside comes with up to eight CPUs on four cards, up to 1Mb L2 cache, 128Mb to 2Gb RAM, 2Gb to 36Gb disk and six free slots. Prices go from $54,000 for a two-way. Additional dual-CPU boards are $12,000. The eight-way, with 1Mb L2 cache, is rated at 258 SPECint_rate95, and 200 SPECfp_rate95. The two-way performs at 71.9 SPECint_rate95 and 57.3 SPECfp_rate95. The eight-way does 5,774 tpmC ($243 per tpmC). The R40 rackmount version of the J40 with from 128Mb to 2Gb RAM, from 2Gb disk costs $69,000 as a two-way. Dual-processor upgrade cards are $12,000. All run the Unix 95-compliant AIX 4.2.
No charge
There are no-charge PowerPC 604 upgrades available for PowerPC 601 SMP Models G30, J30, R30, and R3U. The 604 was originally due mid-1995. Each dual PowerPC 601 processor board currently installed can be replaced with a dual PowerPC 604 processor board. The dual PowerPC 604 112MHz processor boards come standard with 512Kb Level 2 cache per processor on the Model G30 and with 1Mb per processor on the Models J30, R30, and R3U. Though IBM says the boards are available, that seems to mean August 30.
