Six Models Introduced by I.B.M.

By David E. Sanger
The New York Times

January 27, 1987

Just days after one of the worst earnings reports in its history, the International Business Machines Corporation made a bid to bolster its product line yesterday by introducing six new mainframe models, including the most powerful computer it has ever made.

The largest of the new machines uses six central processing units in tandem, and the company said the $11.5 million computer would offer 60 percent more computing power than the previous largest model. Part of the increase was attributable to a new megabit memory chip - twice as fast and a third as large as I.B.M.'s original million-bit chip - that appears to be the most advanced memory device used in any commercial computer system.

A Critical Time

The introductions come at a critical time for the embattled computer giant. Users of its largest mainframes have complained that the current top-of-the-line offerings, the I.B.M. 3090 models, do not mark a sufficient improvement over the previous generation. Some analysts have suggested that an underpowered 3090 line, widely known as the Sierra series, has contributed to I.B.M.'s earnings troubles, especially because mainframes are among its most profitable products.

Yesterday I.B.M. executives, while not conceding a problem existed, said indirectly that the problem would now be solved. With the new introductions, said Edward E. Lucente, who heads the company's information systems group, ''you can now go from the low end of the 3090 series to the high end and get about an eight-times boost in power.''

Such multiples are important to the large companies that buy the vast majority of mainframes, because it means that they can greatly increase their computing power without investing in entirely new software.

Greater Power Potential Cited

I.B.M. executives also suggested that the Sierra line had not yet reached its power limits. When the first 3090 machine was introduced in early 1985, Jack D. Kuehler, who oversees the development of all of I.B.M.'s large-scale products, called it ''the foundation of a skyscraper.''

In an interview yesterday, he said: ''Now you see 20 more stories. You could see 20 more. It's not a skyscraper yet.''

On the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, I.B.M. was the third-most-active issue, closing up $1, at $127.25, on a volume of 1.9 million shares.

Meanwhile, analysts questioned whether the stacking of more stories would alone solve I.B.M.'s problems.

While the new computer models improve the price performance of the 3090 - the cost of each unit of computing power, usually measured in millions of instructions executed per second - they add relatively few new functions.

''Customers are asking for systems that manage networks better, that integrate with other computers better, that make it easier to write applications programs,'' said Stephen P. Cohen, a vice president of the Gartner Securities Corporation, a Stamford, Conn., firm that follows the computer industry closely. ''I don't know if this will spur incremental demand or get a leg up on competitors,'' Mr. Cohen said. ''People aren't holding off simply because a Sierra costs 10 percent more than they want to pay.''

By most estimates, the company has so far shipped about 2,500 Sierra series computers, lumping together all models. About 80 percent of those, or 2,000, were shipped last year. Many predict, however, that a combination of economic pressures on large computer purchasers - such as oil companies, auto makers and others - and a desire for more functions could make it difficult for I.B.M. to match the 2,000 figure this year.

Competition Heating Up

At the same time, competition is heating up. Both the Amdahl Corporation and the National Advanced Systems division of the National Semiconductor Corporation are aggressively marketing their I.B.M.-compatible mainframes. And while those two companies sold only about 100 of the machines between them last year, some analysts believe that they could ship four to five times that figure in 1987.

Four of the new models introduced yesterday are enhancements of I.B.M.'s current Sierra series, with expanded memory and more densely packed versions of the ''thermal conduction modules'' that house and cool the logic chips.

The two entirely new models are the 300E and the 600E. The former uses three processors, while previous models used one, two or four. The 600E uses six processors, and while the Sierra design would allow up to 16, there were signs yesterday that six may be the practical limit until I.B.M.'s next generation of mainframes, not expected until 1990.

Perhaps the most impressive technology in the new machines is the memory chip. I.B.M. was the first to introduce and incorporate in a computer system a chip capable of storing one million bits of information. The new version packs that circuitry onto a chip about one-fourth of the surface area of a dime, and takes only 80-billionths of a second to access a specific piece of data on the chip.