[PLUG] IBM 970 - the other shoe drops

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

IBM finally dropped the other shoe...

The 970 Chip (Apple's G5) will power a new series of "low end" super 
powerful Linux servers. ... cheap.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1197450,00.asp

"The ULE models, which will run Linux and IBM's AIX OS, will ship in 2U 
two-way and 4U four-way configurations. A base configuration of the 4U 
is expected to cost less than $3,500, sources said.
...
With the upcoming PowerPC 970- and GPUL2-based ULE products, IBM will 
stress better performance than Xeon-based servers, 32- and 64-bit 
compatibility with no migration costs or penalties, and linear price 
scaling from two-way to four-way systems. Against Itanium and Itanium 2 
servers, IBM will promote the ULE as cheaper, less power-hungry, cooler 
and easier to set up."

With AMD on the ropes "because of SARS," the end of the WinTel (*86 
instruction set) hegemony may well be on the way.

... While IBM is a large consumer of chips, Apple is an order of 
magnitude larger. With the two of them "entering the consumer market" 
the price of the 970 chips is dirt cheap. Coupled with the new Fab 
where they are being built, the 970 PPC and its successors are going to 
be a cheap high performance chip that the *86 folks are going to have a 
tough time competing with.


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
# Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg
# Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg
# PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a
magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com

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