Dave Andrews
This spring and summer, Apple, IBM, and other companies will introduce the first Macs based on the PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus, the first PowerPC-based ThinkPad, and new PowerPC systems from IBM. In addition, PC manufacturers and peripheral makers will announce their entry into the Power Mac market. Farther out on the horizon is IBM's OS/2 for PowerPC, which is not expected to ship until later this year.
This spring or summer, Apple will reportedly introduce three PCI-based Macs, code-named the Tsunami, the TNT, and the Nitro. Apple declined to comment on the systems, but sources say the Tsunami will represent the high end of PCI-based systems and will target high-end desktop publishing and 3-D applications.
With Apple's move to PCI, the options that users will have for third-party graphics acce
lerator boards should increase. Apple is reportedly developing its own PCI-based graphics accelerator board, but the company will be joined by several others, including Radius and well-known PC peripheral card makers, such as Matrox.
"Power Mac users will get a more competitive mix of products to choose from," says Mary Ellen Power, communications manager for Matrox (Dorval, Quebec, Canada). Matrox's new Millenium board for the Mac will offer QuickTime video, QuickDraw 3D, and graphics hardware acceleration and, like the PC version, will use the new Window RAM memory. Power says that a 2-MB version of the card will cost "under $500."
The fact that these companies are entering the Mac market at the same time as the debut of Apple's PCI Macs is no coincidence. Vendors say they were already preparing PCI cards for the PC market, and adapting their cards for PCI Macs requires much fewer resources than redesigning for an entirely different bus, such as NuBus. "People are looking at the Mac market to
make a little more money," Matrox's Power says. "Doing it without PCI would have required a total redesign." With PCI, the modifications required to bring a card over to the Mac, such as writing a new BIOS, are minor, vendors say. Other companies, including ATI Technologies and Diamond, also plan on introducing new add-in cards for the Mac.
Also, sources say that IBM was expected to introduce in late May a number of high-end PowerPC-based desktops for the business market, using a mixture of PowerPC 601 and 604 chips running at 100 MHz or higher. Because OS/2 for PowerPC is not expected to ship until later this year, the systems will ship sometime this summer with PowerPC versions of AIX and, perhaps, Windows NT.
But IBM is stymied by the delay of OS/2 for PowerPC, and it's not certain when Microsoft will release Windows NT 3.51, which will support Alpha, Intel, Mips, and, now, PowerPC processors. In early April, Microsoft told vendors the OS would ship in "four to six weeks," says Mark Landrum,
project manager for the new PowerPlay line, a series of PowerPC 604-based 100-MHz systems that IPC (Austin, TX) expected to release in May. IPC, which had previously sold only PC clones, says its new PowerPlay systems will target CAD, graphics, as well as other high-end applications.
However, vendors entering the NT PowerPC market must contend with a lack of native NT applications, which can't ship until NT 3.51 ships. "Windows NT 3.51 is on track for Q2 release," says Megan Bliss, lead product manager for Windows NT workstations at Microsoft. "I don't want to try to predict beyond that."
Note: In addition to PowerPC desktop systems, IBM was expected to announce in May two PowerPC-based notebooks, both of which will be based on the PowerPC 603E chip running at 100 MHz. The systems, which will look like current ThinkPads, will include a CD-ROM, 16 MB of RAM, a TFT (thin-film transistor) screen, and support for business audio. One version will offer a built-in camera for videoconferencing.
PowerPC Tidal Wave
