New intelligence on the forthcoming F series of IBM 3090s, now due early next year, from Marc Butlein of Gartner Group suggests that they will use a new 4M-bit memory chip, fibre optic channels running at 6M-bytes per second, and a new prime release of MVS/XA with 47-bit mem-ory addressing and the capability to manage multiprocessors with an odd number of CPUs more effectively: the Fs are also expected to have a 128Kb cache, and a Model 3090/500F will provide an upgrade path for 3090/300 users, while a six processor 3090/600F should offer about 100 MIPS performance.
