Motorola Inc’s Tempe, Arizona-based Motorola Computer Group has announced a 88110 RISC-based family of XR Series 900 systems just days before announcing its PowerPC strategy. The unit had said it would offer additional 88110-based systems of one form or another before finally casting aside the semiconductor group’s RISC for PowerPC (CI No 2,352), although these use processor boards already found in a range of other systems aimed at the same market. Like the existing FTseries, the new XR machines are tailored specifically for the telecommunications community, this time bearing Network Equipment Building System compliance. The four models, which use the company’s 40MHz 88110 MVME 187 and 197 boards, are claimed to be earthquake and fire-proof, come with uninterruptible power supplies and a slew of intelligent network protocols and other telecommunications software. The XR9209 is a duplicated affair for high availability. All come with from 32Mb to 640Mb RAM, 520Mb to 100Gb disk, Ethernet, Small Computer Systems Interface from four serial and one parallel port, and are binary compatible with Motorola’s existing SeriesFT fault-tolerant boxes. The XR9109 costs from $22,355, the XR9209 costs from $40,400, the XR9112 starts at $22,150 and the XR9120 from $22,500. Each can accommodate one or two processor modules except the XR9209, which comes as two single processor systems. EBS Inc’s AccessManager Signalling System 7 implementation is already up on the XR Series.
