IBM RS6000 delivery times

[Chuck Musciano]

Bruce Allen writes:
> My friendly IBM salesman has been trying to convince me to order an
> entry-level (model 320) RS6000 machine.  In my experience, these are about
> 3 times as fast as SparcStations on floating-point intensive code.  I
> would be more interested if I thought that they could actually deliver a
> system before next year.  He claims that delivery times are 6-8 weeks.  I
> don't find this credible.  Can anyone relate their experiences?

Don't believe him.  IBM has publicly stated that all shipments through the
end of 1990 have been allocated, and the earliest delivery dates for new
orders are January, 1991.  If he can get one in 6-8 weeks, it must be some
demo machine they are getting rid of.

The IBM sales force is still undertrained to sell these things.  They
really don't have a handle yet on the workstation market.  One story has
an IBM rep at a trade show telling people the 6000 has a CGA display
adapter in it.  If you are unsure of your knowledge about workstation
products, don't count on the IBM guy to educate you properly.  He's still
learning, too.

By the way, make sure you test drive one of these things before you buy.
Make no mistake: they are screamers on floating point stuff.  But the
window system and OS are absolutely pathetic.  They might call it Unix,
but it doesn't resemble any Unix I've ever seen.  Everything is different,
from the way you mount file systems to the error messages.  Get some hard
experience before you commit to this machine.

My recommendation: buy a 320, small disk, and an Ethernet board.  Hang it
on your net as a compute server.  Telnet in, run that big job, and get
out.  Don't let anyone actually try to use it as a personal machine.

Other good questions for your IBM salesperson: which OS will they be
supporting in a year or so: OSF/1, AIX 3, or some variant?  Which window
system: Motif, SAA, or Presentation Manager?  When can you expect third
party memory SIMMs with a price comparable to third party memory for Suns?

My favorite: ask them how many instructions per cycle their CPU executes.
If they say "five" (and they will), ask him how often you can expect to
actually get five per cycle.  If they say anything but "hardly ever", ask
to talk to another sales rep.

Chuck Musciano				ARPA  : chuck at trantor.harris-atd.com
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