IBM Hints at Future Entry and Midrange iSeries Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Everybody knows the Power4-based "Regatta" servers will debut in July bearing the iSeries moniker and running OS/400 and Linux. But IBM has said nothing about its plans to upgrade the Model 270 line. As it turns out, IBM hinted last week that it would deliver enhanced processors for its iSeries Model 270 product line in the second half of the year, too. While IBM wasn't specific about its plans, it does have a number of options.

Lucky for iSeries customers, IBM's pSeries servers are already using 668 MHz and 750 MHz S-Star processors. Specifically, different models in the pSeries 660 family use the 668 MHz and 750 MHz S-Stars. The 668 MHz chips are equipped with 4 MB of L2 cache memory, and the 750 MHz chips come with 8 MB of L2 cache. If IBM reengineered the Model 270 motherboards to use these faster chips--which was necessary when moving from the prior RS/600 80-class servers to the pSeries 6X0 frames, in some cases--it could announce machines that are substantially faster than the iSeries Model 270 servers available today. You can see a table showing the existing Pulsar and S-Star generations of Model 270 machines, as well as my guess about what future Model 270 machines might look like, by clicking here.

If IBM creates Model 270s using these 668 MHz and 750 MHz S-Star processors, as I think is very likely, they might look a lot like the machines I show in the table. There has been a fair amount of speculation over the past two years that IBM could ramp up the clock speed on the PowerPC chips to as high as 800 MHz or even 900 MHz--and, indeed, some IBM sources have said flat out that IBM would do this--but more recently, sources at IBM have told me that the company cannot push the S-Star PowerPC processors much beyond the 750 MHz level they are at. They say, however, that IBM will continue selling S-Star servers throughout 2002 and probably into early 2003, so it is not by any means a dead product, but they also say that there is increasing pressure within IBM to move as much of its server line to the Power4 chip as possible. I think that a Model 270 using 900 MHz S-Star processors is very unlikely, but it may be possible to get clock speeds up to 800 MHz. I think IBM will take the easiest way out and just go with the existing S-Star chips.

But IBM could surprise us. The company is committed to moving the midrange of the pSeries Unix server line to the Power4 chip, sometime during the second half of the year. As I have said before, if IBM has a lot of partial duds coming off the Power4 production lines--the Power4 chip actually contains two processors on a single chip--IBM could recycle these chips into special low-end iSeries and pSeries machines. Back in December, I speculated that baby Regatta servers with one, two, or four active processing elements would make excellent "Bumblebee" specialized iSeries servers, particularly if IBM was only going to throw half-working Power4 parts in the garbage anyway. A Power4 chip with only one core working at half speed (550 MHz or 650 MHz) with full L2 and L3 cache will be very fast--considerably faster than today's S-Star processors working at the same clock speed, particularly on Java and other intense workloads.

As for pricing, I think that IBM is going to have to cut prices and boost the performance of the Model 270 line to keep the Model 270 competitive. (IBM may or may not agree with me on that.) Sometimes IBM likes to believe that boosting performance and holding prices about the same is enough to keep the iSeries competitive; sometimes it sees, correctly, that it has to keep those unit prices coming down. It's a gamble as to what IBM will do, but the Model 270 comparison chart shows what I think IBM will do, given the sorry state of the economy and the company's desire to stimulate sales at the low end of the iSeries line. I am hopeful that Big Blue will make the right choices for the long run, and my table reflects that belief. My estimates also assume that IBM will cut the prices it charges for 5250 interactive features, thereby making the new Model 270s more attractive to traditional green-screen customers who have thus far stayed away from new iron because of the high cost of these features.