Motorola Inc last week unveiled its long-promised PowerPC reference design so PowerPC boxes can run NT, MacOS or AIX operating systems. It’s the first system to conform to the so- called Common Hardware Reference Platform and it has been tagged Yellowknife. It can host 603e, 604 and 604e chips and is supposed to get PowerPC OEM customer boxes, such as they are, to market quickly without having to design their own systems from scratch. Motorola signed Alaris Inc to manufacture Yellowknife boards for potential OEM customers to play with, but only Mac cloner Umax Computer Corp was willing to publicly commit to a Yellowknife personal computer as an actual product. Umax promises to ship its first systems early next year, with no word on price. The Yellowknife design uses an ATX-standard form factor, a modest four-layer printed circuit board, Motorola’s own PC106 PCI bridge/memory controller, a Winbond/VLSI PCI-ISA bridge, National Semiconductor Corp’s Super input-output controller and an Apple Computer Inc input-output controller. Meanwhile, Firmworks Inc unveiled its Power Firmware multi-boot firmware, with the Longtrail Reference System, a sample design to show customers how to use Power Firmware with Yellowknife to make a complete system with NT and MacOS boot capability built in.
