IBM Corp is following up its summer drought of product announcements with a flood that will keep everybody busy until Christmas, and yesterday, it duly launched the RS/6000 Powerserver 980 – server only, and the 580, which comes in station and server versions. Both use a 62.5MHz version of the Rios RISC: the 980 is the new top end to the 19 rack-mounted sub-family. It has 32Kb instruction cache, 64Kb data cache, and two 80M-byte per second Micro Channel buses each capable of supporting eight input-output adaptors. The second group of eight slots is an option and can be ordered with the initial machine or field upgraded at a later date. Base disk on the 980 is 2.74Gb. It’s out on October 23, with upgrades in November and costs $114,500.The 580 has the same processor configuration, 64Mb memory, 2Gb disk and one 80M-byte per second Micro Channel, and integrated SCSI-1 adaptor. It’s out on October 23, at $62,500. IBM also cut pruces on the 220, 340, 350 and 560 RS/6000s, with the 220 cut 9.5% to $3,800, and the 560 cut 8.7% to $57,500. But it put UP the cost of almost all RS/6000 model conversions by some 15%.
