FirePower Systems Inc’s press release writers deserve a medal for their alacrity, since despite the lack of a firm shipping date or a price for the new 603e, FirePower used the past tense the other day to report that it has expanded its line of turnkey and board-level systems with one of the first available desktop personal computers based on the 100MHz PowerPC 603e. Firepower claims that the early announcement has serious intent, demonstrating the flexibility of its Powerized ES design to incorporate new processors. It also says the new Powerized ES3100 boards will be available from the second quarter, at least in evaluation quantities, and it says OEM customers should be able to build machines using its boards with a street-price of less than $3,000. FirePower announced the PowerPC 604-based ES4100 uniprocessor and MX4100/2 dual processor systems last October. Firepower’s boxes are all PowerPC Reference Platform-compliant, but the company’s blurb describes it as being dedicated to providing systems that meet the yet-to-be-finalised Common Hardware Reference Platform specification.
