IBM RS/6000 - Manual (Page 25)

Chapter 1. Introduction
IBM offers a family of powerful workgroup servers, the RS/6000 Model E20 and the
RS/6000 Model F30, that are ideal for running small business and departmental
applications. These servers use the PowerPC processor architecture and offer
large memory capacities, PC I/O compatibility and flexible configurations.
The RS/6000 Model E20 is the lowest-cost entry server and is intended to be the
RS/6000 family's competitive product for the price-conscience entry server market.
The RS/6000 Model F30 is a system targeted toward those customers looking for
investment protection, with a reliable, highly expandable system.
In order to keep development costs as low as possible, the PCI-based RS/6000
servers use components and subsystems developed in other areas of IBM as well
as the "PC Clone" industry at large. The design of this server family is intended to
have much in common with the PC Server line of IBM products produced in Boca
Raton and Raleigh. The power and mechanical packaging of the PCI-based
RS/6000 servers is the same as that used for packaging the IBM PC Server
products.
The electronics partitioning of the PCI-based RS/6000 servers (see 2.3, “Electronics
Partitioning” on page 19 for more information) has been chosen so as to allow a
fast and easy upgrade to more powerful processors, and even to multiprocessor
systems.
The PCI-based RS/6000 servers are based on the PowerPC Reference Platform
(PReP) system architecture; thus they have the capability to run several different
operating systems. Currently, only AIX and MicroSoft's Windows NT have been
announced for this platform; however, the PReP-based hardware design for
memory and I/O subsystems allows for the support of other operating systems that
may be announced in the future. See 1.2, “Introducing the PowerPC Reference
Platform Specification” on page 4 for more information about the PReP
specification.
Their orientation to the PReP specification makes the PCI-based RS/6000 servers
different from the "classical" microchannel-based RS/6000 systems. As yet,
microchannel is not available, but the PCI and ISA bus architectures have been
implemented on these types of machines. The AIX operating system was
enhanced in several areas in order to manage the new hardware architecture.
Those areas include support for stand-alone and online diagnostics on machines
without a physical mode key as well as configuration helpers for ISA adapters.
Although most changes made to AIX to enable support for the PCI-based RS/6000
servers are transparent to the end-user, in some areas the system administrator will
be confronted with platform-specific issues. This will be the case, for example,
when configuring a PCI-based RS/6000 server as a Network Installation
Management (NIM) Master. This book is intended to help end-users and system
administrators in understanding these platform-specific AIX issues and provide the
“how to” information required to handle these differences.
In this chapter, we include a brief introduction to the PReP specification. For a
more detailed overview of the specification, you may refer to the
Managing AIX V4
on PCI-Based RS/6000 Workstations, SG24-2581, redbook.
 Copyright IBM Corp. 1996 1