IBM Corp says that its long overdue 112MHz PowerPC 604 upgrades for the RS/6000 G, J and R series servers will be generally available this month and will be supplied free of charge to 601 customers. The 604 was originally due in mid-1995 (CI No 2,629). The PowerPC servers are based on the eight-way Micro Channel Architecture bus Escala system designed by Compagnie des Machines Bull SA and IBM. It reckons the things will go to around 5,700 tpmC. There will be a 150MHz upgrade six months later; the 604 is scheduled to go to 300MHz. As expected, the 604 units will also become available for the RS/6000 SP Power Parallels as the first PowerPC and symmetric multi-processing nodes the high-end system supports (CI No 2,629). As for 64 bits, the RS/6000 symmetric multiprocessing people tell us that its own design will be the core product offering, even if Bull does manage to create a workable PowerPC 620-based system. It says it has made no decision on whether it will offer a 620 system yet. RS/6000’s Castor design uses the Apache PowerPC 625 vari-ant of the AS/400 division’s multi-chip PowerPC AS, with frame, power supply and other components coming from the PC Server group (CI No 2,865). For the technical compute workstation crowd, 135MHz Power 2 SuperChip workstations will be announced in a few weeks, with general availability by year-end. They will also be available as SP nodes. Meantime, IBM denies Meta Group Inc claims that the delay in introducing 604 symmetric multi-processing systems has hurt its market standing; it says International Data Corp numbers show it has 20% of the mid-range and high-end commercial symmetric multiprocessing market, with Hewlett-Packard Co at 17% and Sun Microsystems Inc on 7% and it claims it is ahead of its 1996 forecast at this point. It says that most of its RS/6000 customers have told it they would like to try out Windows NT on their systems, especially for work-group environments; IBM expects NT-on-RS/6000 to become a significant business next year.
