IBM is expected to introduce later this spring three new midrange RS/6000 servers that feature the company's prized copper chip technology.
In May, the company is slated to debut the F80, H80 and M80 servers. Both the F80 and H80 can scale up to four IBM 450MHz Pulsar chips, while the M80 will come equipped with from two to eight 500MHz Pulsar chips, according to sources close to the company.
IBM officials would not disclose details on unannounced products.
The M80 and H80 are standard, rack-mounted devices, while the F80 is a desk-side server, sources said. Pricing was unavailable; however, the sources said the M80 will likely be priced lower than IBM's current S7A server, code-named Blackbird, which uses about 12 262MHz Northstar PowerPC chips. A base configuration of that server costs US$125,000.
In this way IBM hopes to more than double the price/performance ratio of its mid-range offerings, the sources said.
Big Blue first unveiled its 64-bit copper chip technology last September in its RS/6000 S/80 server in an effort to challenge Sun MicroSystems Inc. in the Unix market. IBM officials say recent benchmarks show that IBM copper chips beat Sun's SPARC chips in price/performance.
Enterprise application developer Baan has reported that it takes 26 SPARC chips to achieve the same price/performance as six IBM Pulsar copper chips.
In January, IBM introduced three other RS/6000 servers that use the copper chip -- the models 44P 170 and 270 as well as the Power3-II SP Node. The 170 workstation is a uniprocessor; the 270 workstation scales up to four processors. The SP Node scales up to 512 nodes, with each node scaling up to four processors.
With the May announcement, IBM will have a complete line of low-end, midrange and enterprise servers running on copper chips.
