By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Now that RS/6000 SP customers know that more powerful Power3-II chips are coming soon and will be available in high-end Nighthawk-II SP nodes in the second half of 2000, IBM has to wheel and deal to get SP shops to buy today rather than wait it out until next year. To that end, IBM is offering RS/6000 SP customers who buy the new Nighthawk SP nodes, which were just announced in mid-September and which can have from two to eight 222MHz Power3 chips in a single node, price protection on the Nighthawk cards they buy today. In plain English, by price protection IBM means that the money that customers spend on Nighthawk nodes today will be subtracted from the price of Nighthawk-II nodes they buy late next year, so there is no penalty for not buying today and there is no reason to wait until next year. The Nighthawk-IIs, just to recap from last week, will have from four to sixteen Power3-II processors in a single node; those processors will run at 350MHz to 375MHz, yielding a three times performance boost jumping from fully populated Nighthawk nodes to fully populated Nighthawk-II nodes.
