The GRANPOWER 6000 series of office computers was Fujitsu’s successor to the K-6000α series. Fujitsu announced the series in May 1997 as a new series of business servers with dramatically improved cost effectiveness and better support for network computing. While carrying forward all assets of the K office computer series, the GRANPOWER 6000 series took a new direction by equipping three of the four models with Intel processors. From 1997 on, Fujitsu repositioned all its mid-range network computing servers under the GRANPOWER brand.*1
Features of the GRANPOWER 6000 series:
- (1) Up to 3.5 times more cost effective (Fujitsu’s own comparison)
- Fujitsu achieved an average cost effectiveness improvement of 250 percent, and even 350 percent with some models, by using Intel Pentium Pro processors in the entry-level and mid-range models (300, 500, and 700) and a 64-bit RISC*2 processor in the top model (900).
- (2) Support for network computing
- Fujitsu made several software upgrades to improve Internet and network support, such as adding support for Java*3 and CORBA,*4 the latest distributed system technology at the time.
- (3) Full backward compatibility with K series assets
- To get around processor incompatibilities caused by the adoption of Pentium Pro processors, Fujitsu supplied a microkernel*5 to run K series applications at the binary level.
- *1. Fujitsu segmented the GRANPOWER brand as follows: GRANPOWER 5000: PC servers; GRANPOWER 6000: office computers; GRANPOWER 7000: UNIX servers.
- *2. RISC: Reduced instruction set computer.
- *3. Java: A programming language developed by Sun Microsystems that was simple, object oriented, and platform independent. It is well suited for use in networking environments.
- *4. CORBA: Common object request broker architecture. A standard defining an architecture and related technologies for object-oriented distributed systems.
- *5. Microkernel: Software responsible for extremely low-level functions at a level below the operating system.
| Model name | 300 | 500 | 700 | 900 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Type | I/II | I/II/III | I/II/III | I/II/III/IV |
| Introduced | May 1997 | |||
| CPU | 200 MHz Pentium Pro | 64-bit RISC*2 processor | ||
| No. of CPUs | 1 | 1 − 2 | 1 − 4 | 1 − 4 |
| Main memory capacity | 32MB − 128MB |
64MB − 256MB |
256MB − 512MB | |
| Disk capacity | 2GB − 40GB | 2GB − 50GB | 8GB − 268.6GB | 8GB − 292.4GB |
| Operating system | ASP V10 | |||
| Other details |
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The specifications above were correct at the time the products were announced. Some specifications were later revised due to product upgrades
