IBM Revamps pSeries Servers

One week after its formal entry into the Itanium 2 market and a few weeks after announcing support for AMD's Opteron processor, IBM has endorsed its own PowerPC architecture with the launch of several revamped pSeries servers. IBM is addressing both the high and low ends of its Unix-based pSeries line.

IBM has revamped the p690 with a Power4+ processor that runs as fast as 1.7 GHz and features Level 3 cache and a new input/output subsystem. The p655, typically used in clustered server environments, features either 1.5- or 1.7-GHz Power4+ processors, in addition to upgraded Level 3 cache, I/O, and memory. The p690 and p655, as well as the p670, also let users activate or de-activate processors as needed. IBM already offers this on-demand feature on its iSeries and BladeCenter servers.

With its latest pSeries upgrades, IBM is balancing between the Unix market's demands for faster speeds and larger memory capacities and its more sobering need for these demands to be met at the right price, says Charles King, research director at the Sageza Group.

The new p690 and p670 models will be available by the end of May. The p690 is priced starting at $493,386 for an eight-way configuration. The p670 starts at $190,411 for a four-way configuration. The new 1.5- and 1.7-GHz processors will be available on the p655 beginning in late July.

IBM last week introduced its x450 server, the first product from the company to use Intel's Itanium 2 processor. The new server uses IBM's Enterprise X-Architecture server chipset, which was developed to run servers with up to 16 processors. It supports the PCI-X bus technology and Error-Correcting Code memory and can work with both 64-bit Itanium chips and 32-bit Xeon chips.

Although the Itanium processor line adds another 64-bit platform to IBM's repertoire, it will be a while before it can compete with the more established PowerPC architecture, King says. "The PowerPC architecture has a lot of legs left," he says. "The release of these new Power4 servers might be the marketing equivalent of 'bring it on' to Intel's 64-bit architecture."