The Canon Inc-financed FirePower Systems Inc company formed in 1993 exclusively to provide PowerPC Reference Platform-compliant systems to the OEM market yesterday launched its first offerings, further embarrassing IBM Corp, which still doesn’t have such machines on the market save in the guise of a low-end RS/6000. The Powerized family is initially offered to run Windows NT Workstation and Windows NT Server. The Menlo Park firm claims to be the first to market – OEM customers are actually scheduled to ship to customers next quarter – with a desktop system or server that incorporates high-end PowerPC 604-based symmetric multiprocessing; it claims its uniprocessor PowerPC 603- and 604-based systems offer up to twice the performance of current Pentium-based personal computers. The company is also offering Powerized designs and logic boards that enable vendors to deliver workstation-level performance and functionality without sacrificing the economy and compatibility traditionally associated with personal computers, it says. Next year, FirePower plans to add dedicated PowerPC-based servers. The Powerized MX product line is designed to enable resellers to deliver fully configured multiprocessing servers and desktops at an estimated end-user tag of $6,000. They have two 604 CPUs, each rated at 160 SPECint and 185 SPECfp. The Powerized ES line, using PowerPC 603 and 604, will enable end-user prices from $3,000 and all include integrated high-performance 128-bit wide memory-bus graphics and 64-bit wide memory bus video input; CD-quality stereo audio; PCI-based 10Base-T Ethernet networking and Fast SCSI-2 expansion; they can take up to 256Mb memory and up to 6Mb of frame buffer and frame store video RAM.
