SuperMac name reappears on new line of high-end systems.
Henry Bortman
Clone Watch
Sensing a great opportunity in Radius' decision to get out of the clone business, UMAX -- you may know it as a manufacturer of popular scanners -- has created a new subsidiary, UMAX Computer Corporation, to scoop up Radius' clone license and sell systems that Radius originally designed but never announced. The new company is owned 80 percent by UMAX and 20 percent by Radius. Radius sweetened the deal for UMAX by throwing in rights to market the high-end clones under the SuperMac label, which Radius acquired when it merged with SuperMac way back in 1994.
UMAX's first clone, tentatively named the Super-Mac StormSurge 150, is aimed squarely at high-end users. At its heart is a 150-MHz PowerPC 604 processor, the fastest PowerPC chip available. Although it comes with only a single such pro-cessor -- unlike DayStar's four-processor Genesis MP -- the StormSurge has a second processor-card slot, making it a likely candidate for a rela-tively low-cost upgrade to a dual-processor system. UMAX has not yet announced any such processor-card upgrade.
Processing power is only one way in which the StormSurge is meant to distinguish itself. For example, it's also the first Mac OS system to im-plement SCSI-3 Wide Ultra, which is capable of throughput up to 40 MB per second -- four times the SCSI transfer rate of the fastest Mac. UMAX implements Ultra SCSI on a PCI card nicknamed "Mercury," which also contains a port for 100Base-TX Ethernet (otherwise known as Fast Ethernet). The StormSurge is the only Mac OS system to offer high-speed Ethernet as a standard feature.
The first SuperMac systems are expected to ship in April or May of this year. UMAX plans to deliver stripped-down StormSurge units to dealers and let them decide RAM, hard-disk-drive, and graphics-card configurations. UMAX Computer will not sell direct. Dealers' final pricing and configurations were not available at press time.
UMAX has a second system, code-named RipTide (another design Radius developed but never marketed), that is scheduled for release later this year. This lower-cost desktop system will contain a high-performance PowerPC 603e chip and three PCI slots. Stay tuned for further details.
