running
ibm.com in early 1998 After the
RT PC—IBM's first
Unix RISC workstation—achieved less than 2% market share, the company avoided using the RT name for its replacement. IBM's announcement of RS/6000 in February 1990 was its reentry into the fastest-growing segment of the PC market, and its use of
AIX was the company's official endorsement of Unix. About 70 vendors demonstrated early versions of software at the introduction. About 100 more announced ports to the system, and IBM said it expected 1500 applications from 700 companies by the end of 1990. IBM aggressively priced RS/6000 after its earlier failure to compete against
Sun Microsystems,
Hewlett-Packard, and
Silicon Graphics.
InfoWorld said that while RT PC "caused only laughter among competitors ... This time no one is laughing" at RS/6000, with performance superior to Sun and comparable prices. IBM said during the announcement that it was faster than competing systems from Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and
Digital Equipment Corporation, and hoped that the company would have 15% of the workstation market by 1992. RS/6000's RISC technology also had a much better
price/performance ratio than IBM's existing proprietary
AS/400. Although the company described RS/6000 as being for scientific and engineering users, observers said that IBM intended it and AS/400 to compete with each other in the
midrange system market, with non-technical software announcements beyond those available for competing workstations. The AS/400 division at
IBM Rochester reportedly attempted to prevent the RS/6000 division at
IBM Austin from selling the product at such a competitive price, and wanted to change its name to a number smaller than "400". An uninvolved company source said "The last thing IBM wanted to do was compete with itself. But it looks like that kind of thinking isn't going to work anymore". The first RS/6000 models use the IBM Standard
Micro Channel (SMC) bus; later models use
PCI. Some later models conform to the
PReP and
CHRP standard platforms, co-developed with
Apple and
Motorola, with
Open Firmware (OpenFW/OFW). The plan was to enable the RS/6000 to run multiple operating systems such as
Windows NT,
NetWare,
OS/2,
Solaris,
Taligent,
AIX and
Mac OS but in the end only IBM's Unix variant AIX was used and supported on RS/6000.
Linux is widely used on CHRP based RS/6000s, but support was added after the RS/6000 name was changed to eServer pSeries in 2000. The RS/6000 family also includes the
POWERserver servers,
POWERstation workstations, and the
IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer platform. While most machines are desktops, desksides, or rack-mounted, there are laptop models too. Famous RS/6000s include the
PowerPC 604e-based
Deep Blue supercomputer that beat world champion
Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, and the
POWER3-based
ASCI White which was the fastest supercomputer in the world during 20002002. == Architecture ==