This wasn’t at all the way the script was intended to go when Apple Computer Inc embarked on a Mac OS licensing program, but yesterday, Round Rock, Texas-based Power Computing Corp came out with significantly the most powerful Mac available, claiming that it eats all Pentium and Pentium Pro machines for breakfast. Reason is that the PowerTower Pro line is the first to use the new PowerPC 604e microprocessor, which comes in versions up to 225MHz, the others being 200MHz and 180MHz. It has six PCI slots, a total of nine expansion bays, 1Mb of Level 2 Cache, an eight-times speed CD-ROM and the highest performing PCI graphics accelerator on the market in the shape of the IMS Twin Turbo 128-bit graphics board with 8Mb video RAM and 2Gb 7,20 0rpm audio-visual-capable hard disk. With 16Mb 225MHz CPU, that’s $5,000. When Apple decided it had to license Mac OS, the idea was that clone-makers would flood the mass market with machines below the price-points where Apple could make a profit, building a base of eager users, many of whom would graduate to Apple’s higher-priced, higher margin models. To the 604, the 604e adds a performance feature to support misaligned little endian accesses for some operating environments, and built-in performance monitor, and also doubles the size of instruction and data caches, offers higher clock speeds with increased bus divider ratios.
