IBM DEMONSTRATES SYMMETRIC MULTIPROCESSING RUNNING UNDER OS/2 2.1

June 22, 1993

     SOMERS, N.Y., JUNE 21, 1993. . . IBM's Personal Software
Products division (PSP) will demonstrate four-way Symmetric
Multiprocessing (SMP) running with extensions to OS/2* 2.1 next
week at the PC Expo trade show in New York City.

     OS/2 2.1, announced on May 18 and generally available last
week, is the latest version of PSP's award-winning, stable and
tested 32-bit operating system.

     With SMP, application processes and threads are
automatically dispatched by the operating system to run on any of
several general purpose processors.  As a result, users of
compute-intensive applications benefit from scaleable
performance.  The level of benefit varies with the degree of
multitasking or multithreading.

     Compute-intensive applications that would benefit most from
symmetric multiprocessing include servers (database, transaction,
application and mail), workstation applications normally found on
RISC or UNIX** systems, and mainstream applications such as
voice, graphics and video.  Even single tasking DOS and
DOS/Windows applications would benefit because OS/2's heavy use
of threads allows for overlap of system services and application
execution.

     As it did at the recent COMDEX/Spring exhibition, PSP  will
demonstrate five applications running simultaneously on a
four-processor SMP system.  Preliminary results of prior
demonstrations indicate up to an 85 percent improvement in
application performance for productivity applications running on
a two-way processor.  Benchmarks for database and transaction
processing servers will be performed as the product is developed.

     "SMP allows users to experience dramatic performance
improvements," said PSP President Lee Reiswig. "OS/2 applications
can perform dramatically better because OS/2 is designed to take
advantage of SMP's power, since all the facilities required are
built into the base operating system."

     PSP, which is working with vendors such as the IBM PC
Company, Intel**, AST** Research, Corollary and Compaq**, is
demonstrating that SMP can be provided on any 486 or above Intel
platform.  This will make SMP available to users of a large
number of personal computers.  Anyone who needs to make use of
this highly advanced technique can do so.

     PSP plans to make beta copies available later this year to
OEM's, customers and software developers.

                              # # #
*    Indicates trademark of the International Business Machines
     Corporation.

**   The following is a trademark of the indicated company: UNIX
     Systems Laboratories Inc. (UNIX); Intel Corporation (Intel);
     AST Research, Inc. (AST); Compaq Computer Corporation
     (Compaq)