This Ebola project expands upon the multitude of ongoing partnerships we have with our
I-STAR technology demonstrating its broad applicability across diverse areas, including oncology, HIV and other infectious diseases.'
When pressed as to why IBM would cancel the I-Star announcements, she replied with her own question: "Why would we announce a new product when folks are just coming through Y2K?
While they and their IBM business partners both understand that the AS/400 business is on the rocks at the moment because of its dependence on ERP software sales to drive hardware sales, it can be argued just as logically that what IBM needs to do is move up the I-Star announcement or push Pulsar-based AS/400s out of the door to stimulate demand.
This year's just-announced RS/6000 S80 "Condor" server, which is smoking all the Unix vendor in benchmark tests, is more or less a prototype for what the high-end AS/400 I-Star models.
I-Star is virtually identical to the 450 MHz Pulsar, so it is probably not a chip design problem that is holding up the I- Stars.
The RS/6000 division has been mum about the I-Star so far, and has only implied that it would use the fastest chips that IBM could deliver in future RS/6000 machines, be they Pulsar, I-Star or Power4.
IBM has only officially committed to doubling the scalability of the next line of AS/400s sometime in 2000, incidentally, although that official statement is so recent that the people who made it to me a few months ago obviously knew that IBM was considering pushing out the I-Stars already.
Right now, it looks like the Pulsars will run at between 450MHz and 525MHz, mainly because IBM won't hit higher speeds until it announces the
I-Stars next year, which will run at 560MHz thanks to the extra clock speeds that are enabled through the use of IBM's other advanced chip technology, silicon-on insulator.