Xref: utzoo comp.unix.aix:539 comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt:1391 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ibmpa!ericm From: ericm@ibmpa Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix,comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt Subject: Risc System/6000 Summary: product announcement Message-ID: <4115@ibmpa.UUCP> Date: 16 Feb 90 02:37:11 GMT Sender: news@ibmpa.UUCP Reply-To: ericm@ibmsupt.UUCP (Eric Murray) Followup-To: comp.unix.aix Organization: IBM AWD, Palo Alto Lines: 177 ok, here's the offical product announcement... this'll give y'all more things to speculate on. ---------------cut here--------------- HIGH-PERFORMANCE RISC WORKSTATION FAMILY ANNOUNCED IBM today announced the RISC System/6000* family -- a series of nine high-performance workstations and servers that offer customers on the leading edge of technology the power and solutions they are seeking for computing's most advanced, sophisticated challenges. Based on IBM's new POWER (Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC) Architecture, the family includes the industry's highest desktop workstation performance at more than 27 million instructions per second (MIPS) and 7 million floating-point operations per second (MFLOPS). With complete system prices starting at $12,995, it also offers industry-leading price/performance. The nine POWERstations and POWERservers -- with top performance of 41 MIPS and 13 MFLOPS -- are designed to work in heterogeneous, open systems networks with workstations from IBM and other manufacturers. They will be supported by hundreds of third-party applications and backed by IBM's service and support network. This performance is supported by an aggressive software developer program to aid software developers in porting their products to the new family. To date, this program has resulted in commitments to port more than 600 applications worldwide in areas ranging from mechanical and electrical design to structural mechanics and computer-aided software engineering. "The RISC System/6000 family brings unprecedented power to the desks of scientists, engineers, designers and other professionals," said George H. Conrades, IBM senior vice president and general manager, US Marketing & Services. "It enables our customers to do more, whether their POWERstations are operating on their own, interconnected with a mainframe or sharing the resources of a distributed computing environment. Today, we are joined by hundreds of IBM Business Partners and software developers in offering our customers the industry's most advanced workstation solution." The four-member POWERstation family and the five POWERservers feature a high-performance implementation of IBM's Micro Channel bus architecture, and are designed to exploit a new version of AIX -- IBM's implementation of the UNIX operating system -- also announced today. The family is complemented by the new Xstation 120, a very low-priced X server terminal, giving users concurrent access to a variety of applications. The RISC System/6000 family achieves its premium performance with three major technical advances: a new superscalar processor capable of executing multiple instructions in a single cycle; the industry's most advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) floating-point processor for numeric-intensive applications, such as quantitative analysis, and optimized 3-D graphics capabilities for such complex applications as visualization and mapping. "The RISC System/6000 family is the latest example of our continuing drive to bring the benefits of advancing technology to our customers," said IBM President Jack D. Kuehler. "Today's announcement demonstrates our continuing commitment to open systems and industry standards, and our determination to become a leader in the workstation and open systems environment." RISC System/6000 Family The family begins with the RISC System/6000 POWERstation 320, the most powerful desktop workstation available. It has a rated performance of 27.5 MIPS and 7.4 MFLOPS, with a complete system starting at $12,995. The POWER Architecture and advanced IBM CMOS microprocessor design combine to achieve this exceptional level of performance. The workstation family also includes the deskside POWERstations 520 and 530, offering greater memory and disk storage capacity. These systems provide performance of up to 34.5 MIPS and 10.9 MFLOPS. The POWERstation 730, with an integrated Supergraphics Processor Subsystem, is a deskside unit that combines extensive high-function, 3-D graphics with a high-performance superscalar RISC workstation. Its capabilities include a shading processor for solid modeling and other 3-D engineering designs. The RISC System/6000 family is especially rich in graphics capability. Four new graphics adapters range from grayscale to high-function 3-D, allowing customers to implement solutions ranging from desktop publishing to mechanical design to 3-D animated visualization of scientific phenomena. The RISC System/6000 family also includes five high-performance servers with prices starting at $20,375. The POWERservers 320, 520, 530, 540 and 930 can be configured either as LAN-attached servers for multiple users -- compute server or file server -- or as multi-user systems using ASCII terminals or Xstation 120s. These systems offer performance of up to 41 MIPS and 13 MFLOPS. The MFLOPS rating is several times faster than other servers in this price class. New AIX Version AIX Version 3 for RISC System/6000 is an outstanding UNIX operating environment and software development platform. While conforming to open software standards, it includes many new and improved features, such as physical disk space management, advanced file system and program management facilities, extended realtime support and enhanced virtual memory. The new UNIX implementation will provide a windowed hypertext retrieval system that offers a versatile and innovative approach to providing customers with access to online publications and help information. Documentation is available on a 5.25-inch compact disc (CD-ROM) that may be accessed from the user's POWERstation or from a network POWERserver. User Interfaces IBM announced industry-leading graphical user interfaces: AIXwindows Environment/6000, based on the OSF/Motif graphical user interface from the Open Software Foundation; and AIX NextStep Environment/6000, based on the innovative NextStep environment from NeXT Inc. AIXwindows Environment/6000 and AIX NextStep Environment/6000 will be available as separate licensed programs. Customers can choose the interface most applicable to their environments. Service and Support Each POWERstation and POWERserver will be backed by IBM service and support. IBM announced a one-year warranty that includes 24-hour, seven-day-a-week availability of hardware service. Full software service is included in the license charge. In addition, IBM has significantly increased its number of skilled systems engineers to assist customers in the design, configuration, installation and support of the RISC System/6000 family. IBM also announced SystemXtra for the RISC System/6000 family, a fee service offering that provides a total service solution after system installation. It includes a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week telephone hot line for hardware and software problems and usage assistance, in addition to onsite installation of software maintenance. A number of IBM manufacturing and development sites were involved in today's announcement, including: Austin, Texas; Basingstoke, United Kingdom; Boca Raton, Florida; Bordeaux, France; Burlington, Vermont; Charlotte, North Carolina; East Fishkill, New York; Endicott, New York; Essonnes, France; Fujisawa, Japan; Haifa, Israel; Havant, United Kingdom; Hursley, United Kingdom; Kingston, New York; Lexington, Kentucky; Manassas, Virginia; North Harbour, United Kingdom; Poughkeepsie, New York; Raleigh, North Carolina; Rochester, Minnesota; San Jose, California; Santa Palomba, Italy; Sindelfingen, West Germany; Toronto, Canada; Vimercate, Italy; Yamato, Japan and Yorktown, New York. *Trademarks: RISC System/6000 is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. ---------------cut here--------------- eric murray ibmsupt!ericm@uunet.uu.net {ucbvax,uunet}!ibmsupt!ericm KILL YOUR TELEVISION!