IBM to unveil 'Regatta'

October 4, 2001: 10:36 a.m. ET

New server is Big Blue's latest effort in battle with Sun Microsystems

NEW YORK (CNNfn) - IBM on Thursday officially unveiled its newest high-end server, pitting it squarely against a competing offering introduced last week by Sun Microsystems.

Formerly code-named Regatta, the new product is the latest in IBM's eServer line and powered by its newest server microprocessor, called POWER 4, which is the product of five years of development.

IBM's new server, which can be equipped with as many as 32 microprocessors, runs AIX 5L, IBM's latest version of the Unix operating system. It represents the latest offensive in IBM's ongoing campaign to wrest control of the UNIX market from Sun Microsystems, which last week introduced its latest high-end Unix server, called Sun Fire 15K.

Competition in the market for Unix servers, which are large computer systems used for everything from hosting Web sites to executing bank transactions, has intensified in the past year or so, with company's like IBM (IBM: up $0.83 to $97.78, Research, Estimates), Hewlett-Packard (HWP: up $0.10 to $16.10, Research, Estimates), and Compaq (CPQ: up $0.06 to $8.71, Research, Estimates) substantially stepping up their efforts to unseat Sun (SUNW: up $0.48 to $9.48, Research, Estimates) as the Unix server king.


	Rod Adkins, general manager of IBM's Web server business, examines a new eServer p690.

IBM's newest offering, officially designated the eServer p690, reflects five years of development during which a team of as many as 500 engineers from throughout IBM's ranks worked to bring together all of Big Blue's vast technology resources, according to Ravi Arimilli, the chief scientist in charge of developing the POWER 4 chips.

The end result, Arimilli says, is a Unix server that outperforms competing systems at a much lower cost.

"It's targeting the high end from a performance perspective, but if you look at what IBM is charging for this, it's not really targeting the high end from a cost perspective," he said.

Pricing for an "8-way," meaning 8-processor, eServer p690 starts at $450,000.

The POWER 4 processors combine the functions typically carried out by several separate chips in competing systems onto a single piece of silicon. Each is comprised of: two processor cores operating at speeds of more than 1 gigahertz; a high-bandwidth system switch; a large memory cache; and circuits that are used to transferring data between the central processor and peripheral devices.

IBM claims the new chips enable the eServer p690 to outperform servers that have twice as many processors because the information flows between the memory cache and the processor at nearly 125 gigabytes – the equivalent of 25 full-length DVD movies – per second.

"What it boils down to is we get more performance on a 32-way, in many cases close to 2 times, than Sun's 72-way," Arimilli said. "But most importantly, the cost of manufacturing our 32-way is significantly less than what Sun does for their 72-way."