IPC Technologies Inc’s vice-president of strategic planning, Charles Mitchell, says he is actively looking at additional operating system options for its Firepower Systems Inc-sourced PowerPC machines (CI No 2,547). Our intent is to offer Solaris and we will also pursue OS/2, he said. Solaris negotiations are being handled by FirePower on IPC’s behalf at the moment, but Mitchell says that he is talking to IBM Corp directly about taking OS/2 and says that IBM Personal Software Products’ attitude towards licensing OS/2 has softened considerably over the past year. Originally the buy-in was quite large, he said, talking of both the cost of licensing the software and the guaranteed numbers that IBM wanted any licensee to shift, but a year later they are talking about figures that make us think perhaps we can pre-install. IBM’s AIX Unix is a different matter, and although he did not have the exact figures to hand, Mitchell says that IBM is asking something in the region of $1m for companies that want to ship AIX with their machines. To an extent this is understandable: the FirePower boxes have performance that would put many a small RS/6000 to shame. To that extent, IBM finds itself in exactly the same quandary with AIX as Apple Computer Inc does as it contemplates licensing Mac OS. We hope that IBM will shift its attitude to AIX, says Mitchell, who suggested that a co-ordinated approach by a group of FirePower’s OEM customers might be able to ameliorate the cost. IPC’s Singaporean headquarters is uninvolved in the project, which is purely a US venture. The first 603-based machine has a similar configuration to the basic FirePower boxes, with one AT expansion slot, one Peripheral Component Interconnect slot and a third that can double as either. However, they diverge in that IPC will enable the attachment of an extra, external drive. The first machines are likely to ship with a 540Mb disk, a double speed CD-ROM drive and 16Mb of memory. Why go with FirePower? Mitchell admited that it was something of a gamble and said the company also talked to Motorola Inc but felt that we would be just one more OEM customer to the Schaumberg company. In addition, he has considerable faith in FirePower’s ASIC expertise and its ability to tweak operating systems to get the best from the hardware. As for who will buy the machine, well it is not surprising to find that the company is looking for power freaks in the computer-aided design and manufacturing and graphical design marketplace. More of a surprise is the way that the dual-PowerPC 604 processor model is being positioned. That kind of processing power would normally yell server, but Mitchell believes that it also has potential on the desktop, where it could be harnessed for real-time video compression, and hence video conferencing.
