Michael - Re: 240 MHz Motorola CHips"
A month or two ago, Motorola and IBM announced the availability of Power PC chips 603E and 604E with clock speeds rated at 240 MHz. At about the same time, UMAX and Power Computing, manufacturers of Apple Macintosh "clones", announced "Macs" with 240 MHz processors. These should be available by now in Mac Stores.
In a sense, Apple/IBM/Moto have surpassed Intel in the clock speed wars.
Many, Many moons ago, IBM and Apple announced they would design and sell a Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) - a PowerPC based motherboard with the appropriate chip sets and glue logic that would allow systems based on this CHRP to be able to run Macintosh, OS/2, Windows NT, AIX (IBM's Unix) operating systems.
After the announcement, Apple introduced their own proprietary MAC hardware, and IBM and Apple have renegotiated.redesigned the CHRP several times. Basically, Apple never seemed committed to this, and eventually IBM tossed the CHRP onto the stack with OS/2 - perpetual limbo.
Recently, Motorola claims to be offering CHRP systems that will run Windows NT and MAC OS. They advertise systems that do these plus UNIX.
Running Windows NT - which already exists for the PowerPC - and running Windows NT applications are two different things. Applications need to be recompiled on a PowerPC under Windows NT and then optimized (if required). This topic has been discussed several times in the past few months in this forum so I won't dwell on it - other than to say, it should pose no threat to Intel. The demand won't be there. Existing MACS won't run it.
People buy Power MACs because they like the MAC OS and MAC applications. They probably think that Windows NT will cause cancer in their systems.
Paul |
