System/6000 questions.

[drake at drake.almaden.ibm.com]

In article <1990Jul6.043838.16963 at edm.uucp> geoff at edm.uucp (Geoff Coleman) writes:
>From article <4913 at darkstar.ucsc.edu>, by petery at ucscc.UCSC.EDU (20060000):
>-> 
>-> I just got a message from back home (W.Germany) that IBM would not
>-> ship any RS/6000 with less than 16MB memory, because "you would not
>-> get the quoted preformance figures".
>
>	Last I heard a 6000 wouldn't boot with less than 16 Mbytes because of
>building stuff in RAM. I do know that you can allocate 8 Mbyte for debug
>purposes (which effectively takes it out of use) and we saw no performance
>degradation up to at least 20 users for our Progress application (accounting
>software).
>
>Geoff Coleman
>Unexsys Systems

There has been no such announcement made that I am aware of.  Announcement
letter 390-083 included two comments on memory, neither of which matches the
statements made above:

	  HIGH-PERFORMANCE GRAPHICS ADAPTER CONFIGURATIONS:  Any RISC
    System/6000 POWERstation 320 or POWERstation 520 ordered with AIX
    Version 3 for RISC System/6000 and either the High-Performance 8-Bit
    3D Color Graphics Processor (#2780) or the High-Performance 24-Bit 3D
    Color Graphics Processor (#2781) must have a minimum of 16MB of
    memory for software support. 

										    On RISC System/6000 POWERstations configured with 8MB of
    memory in a stand-alone or networked environment where it is
    necessary to have the InfoExplorer hypertext information base locally
    resident, InfoExplorer Graphics Interface performance will be
    degraded because of limited memory.  It is recommended that the soft
    copy data base reside on disk (not CD-ROM) and be accessed only via
    the InfoExplorer ASCII Interface for improved performance.  If
    connected to a larger memory system running AIX Version 3 for RISC
    System/6000 with InfoExplorer, customers may alternately choose to
    use the InfoExplorer Graphics Interface remotely through AIXwindows
    Environment/6000.  The result is improved InfoExplorer Graphics
    Interface performance over local performance in 8MB systems.

I have used a PowerStation Model 320 with 8MB of memory and it boots and
runs just fine.  Performance will depend on what you're doing, of course.


Sam Drake / IBM Almaden Research Center 
Internet:  drake at ibm.com            BITNET:  DRAKE at ALMADEN
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