Digital Equipment Corp continues to pick up licensees for the Alpha AXP RISC, but in general they are not companies that are exactly household names in the industry. The latest, turned up by Newsbytes, is Northern Micro Inc, an Ottawa, Ontario personal computer manufacturer and integrator, which plans to build systems using the Alpha AXP line of processors, for sale mainly in Canada. The Canadian federal government, already one of its main customers, is a likely market, the company says, adding that it has only very limited plans to sell the machines outside Canada, although it has some connections in Africa and may sell some units there. The first machine is the Spirit/150, using the low-end 150MHz version of the RISC and claimed to offer nearly twice the performance of a 66MHz Pentium-based machine. The Sprit/150 comes bundled with Windows NT, and has 16Mb memory, 16Kb internal cache, 512Kb external cache, a six-slot EISA bus, 32-bit Fast SCSI-2 disk controller, 525Mb disk, a double-spin CD-ROM drive, 3.5 floppy and 32-bit 1,280 by 1,024 graphics adaptor with 15 non-interlaced colour monitor and costs the equivalent of $7,500.
