Haunted by a past pocked with failure, Motorola’s Computer Group last week revved its motors yet again for another try at becoming a mainstream box supplier. This time it is armed with PowerPC machines compliments of its alliance with IBM Corp and Apple Computer Inc, aggressive intentions and dubious possibilities. Like its friend IBM, Motorola will sell the boxes with every operating system that can be run on them, from the AIX 4.1 it just licensed from IBM to Windows NT, and possibly Apple’s System 8. Initially, however, they are just Unix boxes, and unlikely to make a significant dent in target Motorola has set for itself to sell between 250,000 and 500,000 PowerPC boxes, boards and chips next year. The company has drawn up a plan for the boxes it will bring out between now and 1996. The plan does not include workstations, although this is a market in which it feels it could compete successfully. Last week it began with a high-volume single-user desktop or mini-tower personal computer built around its own Ultra Peripheral Component Interconnect motherboard and taking a 66MHz 603 PowerPC processor. Depending on some variables, the PowerStack DT603-66, which is immediately available, will sell for a comparatively aggressive $3,300 to $3,500. It comes with 8Mb to 128Mb of internal memory, a maximum 4Gb disk storage, Peripheral Component Interconnect and AT local buses, SCSI-2, Ethernet interface, Super VGA graphics and three expansion slots plus a PCMCIA option. The company has also unveiled its first PowerPC servers, the E603-66P and the E604-100P, the first based on its Ultra board and the other on its Atlas board and using the 66MHz 603 and 100MHz 604 chips respectively. They include 16Mb to 128Mb, SCSI-2, three Peripheral Component Interconnect expansion slots, compact disk or tape drives, PCMCIA and X.25 support and 32 optional serial ports. The units, which will be available later this year, can handle 9Gb of internal storage and will sell for $6,000 and $8,000 respectively. Motorola says they can support 1,289 clients. As anticipated, Motorola also demonstrated a PowerStack MP family that derives from its new alliance with Groupe Bull and its decision to take Bull’s symmetric multiprocessing Escala technology OEM. Like Bull, it has Micro Channel 601-based 75MHz two- and four-way boxes, the MP601-75-2 and MP601-74-4, at from under $50,000. These are planned to expand to eight-way systems. Motorola is also talking about having fault-tolerant machine targeting transaction processing and database applications by the middle of next year. All its products are to be sold indirect through value added resellers, integrators, distributors and OEM customers. In the next 90 days, Motorola expects to supply independent software vendors with hundreds of machines in order to cultivate development of PowerPC NT applications, which are currently scarce.
