DayStar Digital Inc, the Flowery Branch, Georgia company planning the first symmetric multiprocessing Macintosh clones running Mac OS licensed from Apple Computer Inc on PowerPC 604 processors, says it will ship the new high-end workstations in October, with initial prices set to start at around $15,000 and expected to go as high as $25,000 when advanced versions are deployed next year. In its licensing deal earlier this year with DayStar, Apple gave the $50m-a-year maker of microprocessor upgrade boards carte blanche to begin expanding the Macintosh market into the realm of higher-end workstations used by graphics-intensive businesses such as movie editors. Apple is concentrated on the mass market, we will address the high end, the company told Dow Jones & Co in San Francisco. DayStar’s first model, the Genesis MP, features four 132MHz PowerPC 604s, 32Mb memory and 2Gb of disk, is claimed to be about four times faster than Apple’s most powerful Power Macintosh, and the 1996 models are being designed to be up to 10 times faster than the fastest Mac. The company expects to ship 10,000 of the new workstations within the first year of launch – implying at least $150m of business, which sounds ambitious for a company now doing $50m a year.
