Dennis Barker (John Donovan, a reporter in Hong Kong, also contributed)
IBM is mum about when it will ship its next round of PowerPC machines--the ones that run something other than AIX--and major PC vendors are taking a wait-and-see attitude toward the chip. But major Taiwanese PC manufacturers such as Datatech Enterprises, Mitac, Tatung, and UMC stand poised to beat them all to market. However, software remains a big question.
The Taiwan New PC Consortium (TNPC) is a group of 24 companies that includes most of the country's leading PC manufacturers (Acer is the notable exception). Members claim they'll start selling PowerPC systems between now and next month's Fall Comdex. Some say they're already in limited production with PReP-compliant (PowerP
C Reference Platform) machines; in other words, IBM PowerPC clones.
Datatech Enterprises (better known outside Taiwan as DTK Computer) intends to be one of the first to bring an IBM-type PowerPC system to market. The company showed a working prototype at the Computex show in Taipei in June; it was running a beta version of Windows NT. ``We expect to be in mass production by October,'' says Alex Liu, an executive at the company's headquarters in Taoyuan, Taiwan.
DTK's system typifies what the other Taiwanese manufacturers plan to be selling soon: a 601-based system with a 240-MB hard drive, 16 MB of RAM, three PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slots, five ISA slots, and a 15-inch color monitor. This system, with a 66-MHz CPU, will sell for about $2500. You can pick either NT or AIX for an operating system. DTK hopes to sell its systems as ``high-powered personal workstations,'' Liu says. ``We don't want to compete head-to-head with low-end Intel machines.''
Power Macs have been avail
able since last spring. Although Apple had sold about 345,000 Power Macs as of June, not a single Taiwanese company has yet confirmed that it's licensed the system software needed for Power Mac clones.
The Taiwanese do not expect that the PowerPC will be an overnight sensation. ``The PowerPC in the first two or three years will have trouble with the Intel base,'' says Nerow Yang of consortium member Taiwan Auto-Design. ``With a new system, it is hard to do much volume.''
Yang leads the TNPC team dealing with software and porting issues and is aware of the problems associated with the PowerPC. Which operating systems will run on it and when, which operating system will be most popular, and when will native applications be ready? Leaders at other companies, like Chris Hsu at Tatung, see a lack of native applications as the platform's biggest deficit. Meanwhile, Tatung will continue to emphasize Intel machines. But ``if a lot of software becomes available, the PowerPC market will mature,'' Hsu say
s.
Analysts think the $2500 price tag will be too high to compete with Pentium-based PCs, now selling for less than $2000 in some models. ``The Taiwanese will have to take a workstation strategy--not in terms of just selling horsepower, but finding a niche and developing solution platforms,'' says John Donovan, an analyst with WorkGroup Technologies (Hampton NH), adding that vendors will have to work with VARs to design systems that solve specific problems (e.g., customer-service systems, high-powered publishing systems, or software-development stations). Says Donovan, ``To just go out and say `We've got this cheap hotbox' doesn't work anymore.''
Typical Taiwan New PC Consortium Road Map
1994: PowerPC 601-based desktops late in the year
1995: 603-based notebooks
1995: 604- and 620-based servers and workstations
Many vendors in the Taiwan New PC Consortium say they will follow the basic PReP design for now, do value-added hardware engineering in the next generation,
and eventually bring out low-cost dual-CPU models. Many of the companies plan to build motherboards for other manufacturers.
Taiwanese Vendors Wait for Operating Systems
