New product?

[Steve Friedl]

dkelly at npiatl.UUCP (Dwight Kelly) writes:
>Just got an invitation to an IBM product announcement.  Anyone know what
>is being introduced?

A friend of mine got to see an IBM internal presentation about
their new workstation (the POWER series, some kind of stupid
acryonym), and the Big Product Announcement is supposed to be in
the next week or so.   He and I really like to bash IBM, but my
friend could not contain himself here -- he was totally impressed
with the system.  This is what I recall from the conversation.

IBM did extensive studies of what kinds of instructions were
needed by typical workstation, and they built a superscaler RISC
to match it.  Very high integer and floating point performance,
four or five instructions can execute at one time.

They use the MCA architecture, but they have some kind of mods
that kick up the speed from 40mbyte/second up to over
200mbyte/second (and maybe even higher, I don't recall) depending
on the model.  As much as they hate following standards, they
apparently did so by and large across the board.  NFS, AFS, and
TCP/IP come to mind.

UNIX is supposed to be hybrid of Sys V and Berkeley, with a main
focus on Posix compliance.  20000 pages of "great" documentation
on CD ROM, online manuals, hundreds of hours of UNIX tutorials,
etc.

They already have in the ballpark of a hundred applications
ported (including Frame, for instance) and have signed up many
more to be delivered by the end of the year.  They are setting up
porting centers with these machines plus Suns and DECs and such,
plus smart staff to help with the porting.

Oh, they also admitted explicitly that they blew it totally on
the RT and that if they do it again, nobody will take them
seriously in this market.  My friend says that they have not made
the same mistake again.

It looks like a really hot system.

     Steve

-- 
Stephen J. Friedl, KA8CMY / Software Consultant / Tustin, CA / 3B2-kind-of-guy
+1 714 544 6561 voice   /   friedl at vsi.com   /   {uunet,attmail}!mtndew!friedl

"Winning the Balridge Quality Award is as easy as falling off a horse." - me