Acer Group Inc is betting on Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT by developing a MIPS Technologies Inc R4000 and R4400 six-chip set specifically for NT personal computers. It expects entry-level boxes built with the PICA chip set and the Acer reference design to go for under $3,500 yet offer a fivefold performance leap over 66MHz Intel 80486DX2 machines. Acer will introduce a line of Formula 64-bit PICA personal computers at Comdex Spring and will sell the blueprints and OEM motherboards to other vendors. The M6100 PICA chip set, short for Performance-enhanced Input-output and CPU Architecture, includes a high-speed 64-bit local bus to accelerate graphics and networking. Acer intends licensing the bus to the personal computer industry. The design also includes an optional AT bus slot. The chip set is designed to support NT’s multitasking and multithreaded input-output operations. It will be able to handle R4000 and R4400 chips at up to 200MHz. PICA partitions the system into four subsystems: processor, input-output, video and memory. Each subsystem concurrently communicates via a 25MHz 64-bit bus and the CPU local bus running at 50MHz. The memory subsystem is a high bandwidth design offering 200M-bytes per second data transfer capable of addressing 8Mb to 256Mb of memory. The 200M-byte per second video and memory bus is exclusively shared between the 64-bit CPU and the 64-bit input-output master so it yields a high bandwidth for the 64-bit video system. As a result, it is claimed to support high-performance graphics that currently require more expensive technical workstations. The set consists of six VLSI devices, two of which are used twice in a system design. An optional ninth chip is the Acer M1219 Single Chip AT Controller to provide the AT expansion compatibility. The parts are the 176-pin M6101 cache and CPU controller, the 120-pin M6103 buffers, the 208-pin M6109 Inpiut-Output Cache and bus controller, the 136-pin M6105 memory controller and two 144-pin M6107 data buffers. Under its agreement with Acer, MIPS Technologies will license, through its Open Design Center, a pre-packaged design kit based on the Acer PICA technology. At $5,000, the design kit will include all hardware, firmware and software necesary to build a Windows NT-capaMIPS-based RISC personal computer. NEC Corp has already has contracted to make the PICA chip set for Acer, and plans to to second-source the set to systems developers worldwide. Acer will focus its efforts on primarily Asia. Acer plans an independent software vendor programme to attract software house to write to NT. Acer says PICA, developed by Acer Labs in Taiwan, can be modified to support other 64-bit chips running NT because of its modularity. The set is sampling at $200.
