Little two-year-old Deskstation Technology Inc is positioning itself to sell on an OEM basis ACE/MIPS boxes to other Advanced Computing Environment consortium members, a strategy it shares with Acer Corp and Ing C Olivetti & Co, both of which reckon that only a few vendors will actually mass-produce ACE boxes. However, unlike Acer and Olivetti – both of which have started with R4000 prototypes, Deskstation is beginning like Digital Equipment Corp with the R3000, R4000s being not only scarce but also expensive to breadboard. Deskstation president Don Peterson says that people are under the delusion that they’ll be able to trot out a $5,000 R4000 machine, not realising that the motherboard alone would cost $2,000. Deskstation has developed a prototype of a box it is calling the IceStation 3000, the first of its kind outside of DEC’s own, which are supposed to be announced very shortly. IceStation is built around a 25MHz Integrated Device Technology Inc R3000 module which is reported to deliver 20 MIPS. IceStation is being built to compete against high-end personal computers, so its insides very much resemble them and include an AT bus. Deskstation has, however, included a private bus for SCSI and Ethernet, and an Intel 80960 processor for intelligent input-output, effectively making the machine an asymmetric multi-processor, Peterson says. Peterson’s problem getting the machine out the door isn’t one of hardware but rather is one of software. He doesn’t have an operating system to run on the thing. Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Open Desktop is delayed. The reputed cost of a Unix System V.4 licence is daunting. DEC has offered all sorts of help, except an answer to his plea for a copy of Ultrix, which it of course was running on its 3000 prototype at the Comdex show. Microsoft’s Windows NT, on the other hand, appears to be on schedule, but it’s still vapourware. Deskstation has Microsoft’s Hardware Abstraction Layer, HAL, specification under non-disclosure along with the promise of an OEM adaptation kit to enable transfer of NT from the 4000 to the 3000 in January, with developer kit deliveries likely to start in March. But that still isn’t going to get the Deskstation to UniForum with a demonstrable box in the third week of January. So Deskstation will put a Mach kernel on IceStation to tide it over. The Kansas company expects to sell these boxes OEM to firms like Tandem Computers Inc, Zenith Data Systems, Everex Systems Inc, Advanced Logic Research, Siemens-Nixdorf Informationssysteme, even Olivetti, if it needs an R3000 machine from a pricing point of view. It should cost no more to build than a 33MHz 80486 box even with ACE features like accelerated video. Depending on how MIPS’ own newly announced instant ARC kits go, Deskstation may try to position itself as a competitor. Having experience with the Am29000, 80960 and the 3000 RISC chips, it will at least offer itself as a design house to ACE members looking for a set of plans. Such business could get it through the sales drought expected at least until the second quarter next year. Volumes next year are forecast in the high hundreds, with 1993 anybody’s guess. Deskstation currently has a $8,000 price tag on IceStation, but that’s expected to drop. A 33MHz version could be made. It says it overcame the bandwidth limitations of the AT bus by enabling 32-bit data transfers directly with the CPU.
