IBM Corp has started its phased roll-out of the Power Personal machines with the announcement of its Power Personal Developer’s Toolbox Programme. The programme is available in the US and open to both commercial and in-house developers and once IBM has decided that you qualify, you get to buy IBM Power Personal systems, operating systems and software development tools at special developers’ prices – no word on what these are though. IBM has extended its existing programme for hardware and system software developers. It is offering PowerPC 603 and PowerPC 604 reference designs and a new reference database includes these designs, plus modelling and simulation data enabling complete device modelling to be done. Qualified developers get the hardware and database free. It will offer modelling and simulation data. IBM will offer hardware based on the PowerPC 620 next year and is opening a developer support centre in Austin.
