Hey, wanna buy an instant Advanced RISC Computing kit cheap? Folks that don’t want to pay MIPS Computer Systems $500,000 plus additional royalties for its basic ARC manufacturing kit and no schematics can go to Deskstation Technology Inc in Lenexa, Kansas. Deskstation has hung a price tag of $225,000 and no royalties for its ARCstation 1 R3000 starter kit, the only other one besides MIPS’ known to be kicking around. It includes the ingredients for an ARC-compliant motherboard compatible with existing personal computer-style chassis, power supplies, add-in boards, disk drives and video controllers. It will be available in April. If you want the schematics too – which from MIPS would cost a minimum of $1m – Deskstation reckons you want to license a customisable design and will work with the customer. Rumour has it MIPS has a third alternative it is posing to potential clients: no up-front, just 10% of everything you sell.
