Seems that IBM expects people to be hung over on the Tuesday after Labor Day, the US public holiday that traditionally marks the end of summer, for it has put its Summit announcement – or pre-announcement – back to Wednesday September 5: Gartner Group is looking for two Summit models, a 163 MIPS four processor model and a 230 MIPS six-way multiprocessor, but these are not expected to be available in volume until the second half of next year, so in the meantime, repackaged versions of the 3090 J with fibre optic channels, which can be upgraded to Summit via a processor swap-out are expected; the 4391s are expected to come in models up to 22 MIPS, although the new release of MVS/ESA may make it possible to cluster these machines to create a much bigger configuration; new 9370s are also expected – with ESA support – and it seems that IBM will come out with a completely new name for the entire line to stress the fact that the same operating system will run on models – suggested names are ES4000 or ES9000.
