IBM Corp duly introduced a dozen new mainframes using its second generation CMOS System/390 microprocessor, and the version of Ramac with double capacity disks. There are two versions of the chip, R2 and R3, with R3 delivering slightly higher performance. The new chip is clocked at 12nS and performance has also been enhanced by improvement to the cache, but it is still only 40% to 60% faster than its predecessor. IBM claims the so-called System/390 Parallel Enterprise Servers match the 3090J mainframes and are only outperformed by its H2 machines in the water-cooled world. The systems go from one to 10 processors and up to 32 of these machines can clustered in a Parallel Sysplex configuration – giving five times the processing capability in a single-image of the largest mainframe hitherto available. The board in the R2 can now take eight chips, instead of the R1’s seven, with one of them the input-output processor. The R3 board is uses multichip modules, each with five four-chip processors on it; for a 10-way, a second module is mounted on the back of the board. The R3 machines, in one- to 10-way configurations, ship on July 31, the R2s, one- to seven-way, ship in the fourth quarter. IBM does not give prices on mainframes these days. The new Ramac 2 moves to 4Gb 3.5 disk drives for maximum capacity of 180Gb, and increase the ratio of cache to disk capacity. For over 180Gb, a second 3990 controller is needed.
