IPC Technologies Inc, Singapore-based IPC Corp Ltd’s Austin, Texas company, which is taking FirePower Systems Inc’s boxes OEM, is delaying full shipments of the machines pending the release of the finished version of Windows NT for the PowerPC. The machines, which cost between $4,000 and $5,300, are being sold direct by the company, but until Windows NT arrives in its final version the company is restricted to selling evaluation units to businesses and end-users. As for when Windows NT 3.5.1 will actually arrive, the rumour is that it should be finalised any day now. Microsoft Corp sent out release candidate 2 of the operating system to beta-testers a couple of weeks ago. IPC says that it will take a week, or less, from receiving the finished NT disks to beginning normal shipments of the machines. IPC says that the infamous PowerPC 604 shortage has affected it only marginally – 100MHz parts are coming through all right, but faster processors are not as available as it would like. The IPC-Firepower boxes are Open Firmware-compliant, meaning, IPC says, that they cannot run IBM Corp’s AIX operating system, since AIX currently requires IBM’s special boot firmware. But the vendor of the Open Firmware implementation on those systems – FirmWorks Inc, Mountain View – says that a system’s ability to boot AIX is dependent both upon the system’s firmware and upon modifications to the AIX kernel to add machine-specific code to handle the machine’s custom host bridge chip. And the FirmWorks Open Firmware technology base does include an AIX support module, but that module was intentionally omitted from IPC’s Power Firmware ROMs since IPC is a personal computer retailer focused on Windows and not on AIX. FirmWorks’s Power Firmware for to IBM’s Sandalfoot machine boots AIX without difficulty.
