Motorola Inc has followed up its PowerPC-based single board computers for embedded applications with Ultra and Atlas variants designed to be used as motherboards for PowerPC-based personal computers. Fitted with 66MHz PowerPC 603 or 100MHz 604, the Ultras are an all-in-one, low-profile motherboards, the Atlases are in a standard Baby-AT form factor. Motorola is pitching […]
Motorola Inc has followed up its PowerPC-based single board computers for embedded applications with Ultra and Atlas variants designed to be used as motherboards for PowerPC-based personal computers. Fitted with 66MHz PowerPC 603 or 100MHz 604, the Ultras are an all-in-one, low-profile motherboards, the Atlases are in a standard Baby-AT form factor. Motorola is pitching them at the embryonic Windows NT-on-RISC market. They come with 8Mb to 128Mb of parity RAM, and a Peripheral Component Interconnect local bus, PCI and AT expansion slots; an 8-bit SCSI-2 bus interface and an Ethernet transceiver interface, each wa with 32-bit PCI local bus burst direct memory access; 10base-2 and 10base-T interfaces; a floppy port, IDE port; a mouse and keyboard ports. There are also two serial ports in addition to an IEEE 1284 Centronics bi-directional parallel port. The Ultra supports 16-bit stereo audio Super VGA graphics up to 1,024 bits by 768 lines and 65,000 colours non-interlaced and 1,280 bits by 1,024 lines in 65,000 colours interlaced. The boards are PowerPC Reference Platform-compliant inasmuch as that is possible with the specification still unfinished. The boards will cost under $1,000 each in volume and they will be available in the fourth quarter.
