IBM Corp’s new range of PowerPC 604-based RS/6000s are officially launched today, along with, at the low end, the first of its desperately delayed Personal Computer Power Series, and two ThinkPad Power Series systems using the low power consumption 603e chip – but IBM was still struggling to set the pricing for the new models as we went to press. Centre stage are the new RS/6000 43P Series of workstations and servers and their closely related cousins, the PC Power Series 830 and 850. The two ranges are almost identical: both come with a choice of either the 100MHz, 120MHz or 133MHz 604 chips, both use the PCI/AT architecture and both come with 16Mb to 192Mb memory, three AT slots and two PCI/AT shared slots. The RS/6000s use more robust SCSI drives in place of the cheaper IDE drives used on the Power Series boxes, and also have two- and three-dimensional graphics capability. They run only AIX, while the Personals, which will be sold via IBM’s personal computer channels, have a choice of pre-loaded AIX or NT operating systems (from July), OS/2 beta version (also from July) or Sun Microsystems Inc’s Solaris 4.5 (expected by year-end). The 850 is the more expandable version, with a five slot, five-bay design. The two families are expected to sell for much the same price, but Bill Colton, IBM’s general manager, Power Personal Systems Division, is aiming the Power Series at the high-end personal computer or super-client makret, and thinks they’ll ship in high volumes. He’s coy about actual numbers, but when pressed says that could mean four to five times less than IBM’s personal computers volumes, though not in the first year. IBM also launches the RS/6000 42T, an upgraded version of the 41T graphics workstation using the 120MHz 604, claiming a 30% performance increase over the old model, and the C20 server, a similarly upgraded PowerPC 604-based version of the C10 that runs 20% faster than its predecessor.
