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Danyll Wills

IN 1991 IBM, Apple and Motorola sent shock waves through the computer world by announcing a partnership to create a new generation of computer systems.

  These were to be based on RISC (reduced instruction set computing) chips, a new architecture, new firmware, new software.

  The triumvirate created a special group dedicated to working out the enormous problems of multimedia.

  The shocks were caused by what some people saw as an incompatible alignment: IBM and Apple were supposed to be sworn enemies and competitors in the hardware market.

  Motorola and IBM were competitors in the chip market.

  There were many who felt that the alliance would never produce anything of value - but now we have a chance to see for ourselves, with the production of the first PowerPC CPUs.

  This year Apple has taken the lion's share of the spotlight that is trained on the PowerPC with its introduction of the Power Macintosh range of computers.

  This has tended to make people forget that IBM has been working on its own machines based on the PowerPC chip. (The ''PC'' in PowerPC stands for ''Performance Chip''.)   The first machines that IBM will be making are high-end machines in the RS/6000 series, running AIX, IBM's own version of UNIX.

  These machines are aimed at the workstation market for medium to large companies and for individual developers.

  The list price of a RS/6000 250 starts from as low as US$5,730.

  Apart from being a UNIX machine, the RS/6000 can run both Macintosh and Windows emulation software on top of AIX with the help of some emulators.

  The Windows emulator is called WABI (Windows Application Binary Interface) and the Macintosh one is called MAS (Macintosh Application Services).

  The new machine conforms to the ''pizza-box'' school of computer design in that it is only a few centimetres tall and nearly square.

  However, inside everything is neatly and compactly placed.

   The machine I looked at had a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive, a two-gigabyte hard disk and 32 megabytes of memory. The monitor looked rather less sleek, but it was 43 centimetres, colour and easy on the eyes.

  The size of the monitor matters if you are working in windows. A large monitor allows you to place windows containing programs, documents or pictures all over the screen and exchange bits and pieces of data between them easily.

  One of the main factors for the success of the original IBM PC was that it could be cloned - almost anybody could make one.

   It seems IBM realises the value of letting others copy its hardware, and it is keen to establish a similar standard for the new technology: IBM is promoting PReP (Power Reference Platform).

  Some of the minimal requirements of PReP are: PowerPC processor, 80 MB of mass storage, IDI or SCSI disk controller, 3.5-inch 1.44 MB floppy disk drive, 16-bit audio at CD sampling rates, 640 by 480 graphics (256 colours), RS232C serial port running at 19.2 Kbps, and a few other goodies.

  PReP, if successful, would create the hardware and firmware basis for the 32-bit and 64-bit PCs of the future. Just as with the Intel-based PCs of today, if the volume is high enough the price will come down and a new standard will be created.

  IBM soon will release the first of its PowerPC PCs - the machine for the rest of us.

  Denis Yip, the RISC System/6000 product marketing manager for IBM China/Hong Kong, said the first PCs would come with AIX and would later run OS/2, Windows NT and several other operating systems.

  With graphics and multimedia playing a more important part on the desktop, the need for more powerful hardware and software becomes more obvious every day. In order to help the ordinary user move from the older technology and to the new, emulation software running on a RISC chip may be the answer.

  The RISC technology makes emulating another CPU a real possibility for the first time.

  In the past it was, of course, possible to emulate other systems - SoftPC has emulated the MS-DOS operating system on Macintoshes for many years - but the cost in speed has usually been too high; the emulation was simply too slow to be worth while.

   Both Apple's Power Macintosh and IBM's RS/6000 have shown that emulation on a RISC chip can be done with only the smallest amount of performance degradation.

  Ultimately, however, it will be necessary to move on to systems and software that really take advantage of the new chips.

  The transition from the present, slightly archaic systems to the new ones may not happen quite so quickly as it did in the early 1980s, but it will surely happen.

E-mail Danyll Wills at dewills 



IBM puts its RISC chips down on desktop