Taiwanese-owned Acer International Inc has announced the next member of its single chip upgradable personal computer family, the AcerPower 486 EISA. This provides an upgrade path from 25MHz 80486SX to 66MHz 80486DX2 and beyond – to the yet-to-be-announced Intel Corp P5. Like its predecessors, which offered upgrades from 80386SX to 80486SX, the new machines incorporate Acer’s Chip-Up technology, whereby new central processing units are simply plugged into a low insertion force socket. This novelty, Acer says, enables users to upgrade while avoiding the expense of software and peripherals replacement. Also, it means they can cater for current and potential needs at a stroke. The new upgrade socket will support current 169-pin 80486 chips and Intel’s future 238-pin processors. The machines combine local bus and EISA with a PowerVision accelerator. The last features an ATI68800 graphics engine driving up to 2Mb of Video RAM performing at a rate of 30m pixels per second. Other standard features include five 32-bit EISA slots, one local bus slot, two AT slots, one parallel and two serial ports and support for up to two IDE disk drives. SCSI-2 connections for up to seven SCSI compatible devices such as CD-ROM drives, write once drives, magneto-optical disks, DAT devices and tape streamers are available by adding an Acer E4+ Super input-output board. All models have 4Mb of RAM, expandable to 64Mb on board and to 256Mb using 64Mb SIMMs, and are configurable with IDE disks of between 60Mb to 500Mb or with 380Mb to 1.2Gb SCSI disks. They run MS-DOS, OS/2 and Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix and can connect to NetWare, DECnet, LAN Manager and IBM SNA networks. MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 are supplied as standard, there are 13 security features, and BIOS upgrades are available via an optional Flash memory kit. The hard disks can stand in either a horizontal desktop or vertical desktower position. Acer monitors supplied as standard include the 14 AcerView 25, and AcerView 56L 15 monitors boasting 1,024 by 768 non-interlaced resolution; and the AcerView 76i, 17 monitor with 1,280 by 1,024 non-interlaced resolution. They’re out this month, and a typical 25MHz 80486SX configuration will cost UKP1,240, a 66MHz 80486DX2 is UKP1,750. Acer’s European operations were consolidated following the Altos takeover in 1990 (CI No 1,485) and the company now has six offices in the UK, Netherlands, France, Germany, Denmark and Italy. In 1991, the company claims, it shipped just over 60,000 monitors and some 58,000 personal computer systems in Europe.
