Given the price of the chips, audacious launch of the day went to Advanced Logic Research Inc which claims to have desktop, Pentium-based machines starting at $2,500. The Evolution V PC is one of a pair of Pentium products that the company unveiled, the other being the Evolution V-Q server, which starts at under $5,000. The common thread running among many of the announcements was that companies were sprucing up their bus architectures in order to keep up with the faster processor and memory: Advanced Logic’s server features a new ‘Quadflex’ architecture using a 128-bit ASIC chip set and dual 64-bit buses. The Evolution V PC is targeted at system integrators and resellers and uses the 60MHz processor but only a 32-bit bus. The company claims all kinds of tricks are used in the Evolution V-Q’s innards to increase performance, including secondary cache, and the ASIC which provides a wide data path between memory cache and processor. The machine can also address up to 1Gb main memory and includes 13 drive bays and 10 EISA slots.
