PowerPCs Still a Spec on the Horizon

Tom Thompson and Dave Andrews

"The waiting is the hardest part," according to a song by Tom Petty, and that's what users will have to do now that Apple, IBM, and Motorola have released the PowerPC Platform specification. A number of hardware vendors, including Canon Computer Systems, DayStar Digital, FirePower Systems, IPC Technologies, Pioneer Electric, Power Computing, Radius, and Zenith Data Systems, say they will release platform-compliant systems, but most of them won't appear until the second half of this year.

Meanwhile, Intel and other developers of PC-compatible processors continue to bring new levels of affordable computing power to the PC desktop. The PowerPC Platform (formerly known as the Common Hardware Reference Pla tform, or CHRP) provides an open industry standard that can host a variety of OSes. The standard provides plug-and-play capabilities through the Open Firmware boot environment and the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) 2.0 bus.

The PowerPC's bi-endian addressing capabilities will let it run the Mac OS, Windows NT (but not Windows or Windows 95), AIX, Solaris, OS/2, and NetWare. This will allow you to run one OS and then -- after rebooting the system -- another one. Big companies may want to purchase a large number of systems with the same base configuration and let each department run the OS of its choice.

Although the PowerPC alliance consists of several powerful companies, analysts say it will be difficult to compete directly with Intel. "It's very risky and costly to go head-to-head with Intel, which will fight to the death to maintain its market share," says Mike Griffith, senior analyst at In-Stat (Scottsdale, AZ), a market research firm. "The PowerPC has established beachheads in the workstation and Apple markets, but these are two areas that Intel hasn't focused on."

Although performance is important, Griffith maintains that the PowerPC alliance will have to compete with Intel on a number of fronts, including production capacity, distribution, sales, and marketing. Intel's aggressive pricing will make this task even harder, he says.

"Unless it is considerably faster, cheaper, and more open to more things, I am not sure it will attract a lot of interest," says Dan Maude, president of Beacon Application Services (South Natick, MA), a developer of accounting, payroll, and production systems for Fortune 500 companies. "Most of what we do is Unix or NT, and the client is usually Windows. Fortune 500 companies tend to be a cautious bunch, the plumbing is already in place, and the plumbing's not really leaking."

Other administrators embrace the PowerPC Platform concept wholeheartedly, however. "Standardizing on a hardware reference platform will let us reduce costs and time to repair," said one vice president at a large investment bank in New York City. "Having a machine that can perform double or triple duty makes sense, and a common hardware platform will make it easier to service systems at our international offices."

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PowerPC Platform Highlights

-- A minimal system has a PowerPC processor, 8 MB of RAM, 4 MB of OS
   ROM, an RS-232 serial port, and an IEEE-P1284 parallel port. Desktops
   and portables (but not servers) are required to have 16-bit stereo.

-- 8 KB of nonvolatile RAM is required to store system configuration
   information. Systems hosting more than one OS may require more.

-- DMA and an Open Programmable Interrupt Controller to handle device
   interrupts are required.

-- In a compromise to both Mac and PC vendors, the specification
   supports SCSI and IDE, IBM PS/2 and Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) mouse
   interfaces, and 16550-compatible and SCC (Mac-specific) serial po
rts.
   A Mac I/O ASIC handles Mac-specific I/O.

-- The standard defines a common hardware architecture but allows
   room for differentiation.