Digital’s Equipment Corp’s new DECpc AXP 150 is not the machine for people that want to run shrink-wrapped Windows applications quickly. Although the Insignia Solutions Ltd-sourced MS-DOS and Windows emulation enables users to run existing iAPX-86-based applications without modification, they run on the UKP5,350 Alpha RISC based machine at Intel 80386 or 80486 speeds. It is not intended as a mass-market machine, says Dennis Saloky, DEC’s marketing programmes manager for NT. Instead he positions it as a developers box and claims that demand is strong. It is these developers, of course that DEC will depend on to produce the the Alpha-compiled NT applications that will deliver the high performance promised by the processor. For the mass-market boxes, wait until the autumn, says Saloky, when the company is likely to launch lower priced Alpha PCs with comparable or perhaps higher performance. The cheaper RISC-based machines are likely to impinge directly on the territory occupied by the company’s newly announced Pentium machines. In fact, assuming that Pentium pricing stays constant, the new machines will offer comparable pricing and higher performance, says Saloky.
