Note on IBM announcement

[Steve Dyer]

>From: rios at ibmcan.uucp (Bill Rios)

Er, is this a joke, or did they codename the machine after you? :-)

I went to IBM's new product announcement this afternoon.
This was the much-anticipated followon to the less-than-
successful RT/PC.  Even accounting for the typical
marketing hype, it looks like IBM has done a lot right
this time.  The price/performance of the entire family
is amazing--it will redefine the playing field.

The *low end* (19" mono, 8mb memory, 120mb disk) runs both
X11/Motif and NeXTStep, has 27.5 MIPS integer (SPEC) and 7.5MFLOPS
floating point (Linpack) at 20mhz, and will sell for $13K list.
This is approximately 2x faster on integer operations and 4-5x
faster on floating point than the DECStation 3100, and even
better than that against the Sun Sparcstation 1.  There is a cheaper
diskless config, too.  Fully loaded (300mb disk, 19" 8-plane color,
16mb memory) was $23K list.  I don't have prices for the bigger machines.

High end machines with specialized 3d color graphics (24-bit)
were amazing.  Real time shading and motion.  Lots of 3rd
party visualization software which exploits this.

The low end machine is about the size of a PS/2 desktop, maybe
just a bit bigger.  The non-desktop machines are about the size
of a BA123 uVax II cabinet, but are claimed to be quieter and
have less power consumption.

It will be available with both X11/Motif and NeXT's NeXTStep.  Motif
was running on the machines they had to demo today.


-- 
Steve Dyer
dyer at ursa-major.spdcc.com aka {ima,harvard,rayssd,linus,m2c}!spdcc!dyer
dyer at arktouros.mit.edu, dyer at hstbme.mit.edu