IBM has given its largest corporate users some unexpected good news, announcing it will deliver its G5 series of mainframes later this quarter with about 15 per cent more performance than originally planned.
In May, IBM promised shipment of the S/390 G5 Parallel Enterprise Servers capable of delivering 900 million instructions per second (mips). However, IBM, hoping to stem some of the recent market share loss to competitors such as Hitachi, has now announced its higher-end models' top speed will reach 1040mips, making them the first single commercial mainframe systems to break the 1000mips barrier.
Company officials attributed the added speed to the flexibility built into the system's microprocessor core design, which allowed IBM to exploit "recent chip manufacturing enhancements".
Contributing to the added performance is the fact that IBM's design team was able to boost the speed of the system CPU from 470 to 500MHz.
The upcoming systems processor complex has an internal bandwidth that exceeds 15GBps and includes 8MB of Level 2 cache memory packaged in the chip. The system can accommodate up to 10 CPUs, which in turn can be lashed to up to 32 S/390 systems through IBM's Parallel Sysplex clustering technology.
Pricing information on the new line will be available when IBM commences shipments of the products.
