Risc System/6000

[ericm at ibmpa]

ok, here's the offical product announcement...
this'll give y'all more things to speculate on.






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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.





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 eric murray      ibmsupt!ericm at uunet.uu.net       {ucbvax,uunet}!ibmsupt!ericm 
                     KILL YOUR TELEVISION!