Zenith Data Systems Corp is inching towards officially announcing its line of PowerPC machines, which it has so far been reluctant to launch out of concern about PowerPC 604 chip availability; it likes to have inventory before it puts something on the market. It will be keeping the Escala brand name on the multiprocessors it is taking OEM from its owner Compagnie des Machines Bull SA. A uniprocessor version of the one-to-four-way minitower, known as the Escala MT, will start at $16,000 with 32Mb RAM and a 1Gb disk. The two-to-eight-way deskside, called the Escala DS, will start at $32,000 with 64Mb internal and 2.2Gb on the disk. Shipments with AIX should start this month. It is also taking the guts of the PowerPC-based personal computer servers from Motorola Inc which will appear as 603e- and 604-based models branded ZPower.
