IBM Corp has a busy February lined up, and not content with mainframe kickers expected February 9, AS/400 F models February 16, the company has inked in February 2 for an array of new RS/6000s. As well as improved system performance and graphics flexibility for the mainstream Powerstations and servers, the company is planning to announce as a product its scalable, parallel processing system, previewed in Minneapolis in the autumn (CI No 2,054): that’s the eight- to 64-processor machine that delivers a theoretical 6 GFLOPS peak with a full complement of processors. Each CPU can have as much as 256Mb memory and 2Gb disk. IBM already has a very modestly parallel four-CPU system, the Shared Memory System Power/4, available on special bid since December 1. There will also be a data server, although what differentiates that from a Powerserver is not clear – multiple processors perhaps.
