Subject: Re: PowerPCs and Lightwave?
From: George Lane <[email-masked]>
To: Mark Thompson <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 11:41:45 -0800 (PST)

On Tue, 31 Oct 1995, Mark Thompson wrote:

> A year or two ago, I was a major PowerPC fan. Motorola really looked like
> they could kick the crap out of the other vendors with a line of cpus
> that were faster, cheaper, cooler, and smaller. Not to mention the
> architecture was quite nice. But since then, IBM/Apple have really botched
> the whole project, moving way to slowly on settung standards, continuous
> political battles, and sending a very confused vision of how the PPC
> systems will emerge onto the market.

I was also a major fan, so I started the newsgroup comp.sys.powerpc.
Mark's one paragraph quickly sums it up what I have observed over the 
two years since I started the newsgroup. Here's how I would rate the 
A.I.M group.

IBM: C  
They overstated their Workplace OS - which became OS2 for PowerPC. 
After all the hype about how much cheaper the chips were compared to the 
Pentium, their systems were overpriced when finally introduced.
IBM and Apple never really had a common strategy - until CHRP - to make 
anything work together. They still don't have a strategy about the 
software. Eventually, everything was supposed to be Taligent.

Apple: B
The PowerMacs were powerful and popular, but one PowerPC advantage is low 
power consumption. It took too long for the notebooks to materialize, and 
when they finally did, one caught on fire. 

Motorola: A
Motorola realized that they needed an OS, and didn't want to wait for 
OS2 for PowerPC, so they paid for the NT port. Applications are a 
recompile away form already developed NT apps. There is no emulated code 
so NT applications run very fast. The Motorola PowerStack machines cost 
less than a similarly equipped IBM PowerPC machine. 

> >  I hear the 620 chip is supposed to be rather impressive...

> It was supposed to be, but its in major trouble right now. It may never
> see the light of day. PPC looks pretty dismal right now.
 
> And as far as the P6 is concerned, the only thing it has going for it is
> some nice design for SMP. But its much touted performance is a big yawn.
> Intel is besides themselves spewing large specint numbers, but they quitely
> avoid talking about its truely dismal floating point, which is what us
> animators really count on. Floating point is what makes the Alpha so
> attractive, even though its such an expensive, watt-wasting pig.

The Pentium and PowerPC have similar integer performance. Floating point 
performance is the PowerPC advantage over the Pentium, and animators  
need all the floating point performance they can get for their money. 

Therefore, the PowerPC is naturally a consideration for animators who 
are looking for a cost effective solution. The Motorola PowerStacks are 
available running Windows NT for PowerPC, and the 604 systems have 
impressive floating point specs. 

I asked my Motorola rep about software availability, particulatly 
Lightwave. I was told that a lot of NT vendors are actively porting to PPC, 
but Newtek was waiting to see if the PowerPC market would develop.

George Lane

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