Copper conducts electricity better than standard aluminum connections.
IBM's copper chips have 50 percent more transistors and consume about 30 percent less power than the RISC predecessors, Dougherty said. It can have up to 8G of memory and 55G of internal disk storage, Dougherty said. Both servers run AIX, IBM's proprietary version of Unix, and they bundle an AIX Bonus Pack of 22 software tools, including evaluation copies of Oracle8i Server and IBM DB2 Universal Database 6.1. All the prices assume a base memory of 256M and a 9.1G hard drive.