DEC launching Alpha board push

Electronic News, April 4, 1994 by Reinhardt Krause

MAYNARD, MASS.--Digital Equipment Corp. is making a big push into the OEM market with new Alpha microprocessor-based mothewrboards as part of a revamped strategy that also will include spinning out its semiconductor operation as separate business unit.

Like IBM, DEC has been criticized by some competitors as still having a quasi-captive business model, despite its efforts to sell the Alpha into the merchant market (EN, Jan. 17). Competitors have claimed that with their own in-house system development efforts, IBM and DEC may not always have the fastest or most integrated versions of their MPUs available to customers.

DEC will blunt some of those criticisms when it soon announces a business model more akin to RISC competitors such as Sun Microsystems, whose Sparc Technology Business Unit last year moved into the IC merchant market business (EN, Oct. 18, 1993) as well as Mips Technologies. DEC's moves also come as Intel's Hillsboro, Ore., operation is said by some to be increasing its roile as a major supplier of Pentium-based motherboards.

Meanwhile, Taiwan's Elite Group, which last year said it would develop and market Alpha-based motherboards (EN, Oct. 18, 1993), had a mixed reaction to DEC's new OEM push. Motorola, a member of the PowerPC alliance with IBM and Apple Computer, last week said it has no intention of offering PowerPC-based motherboards out of concern for possibility alienating potential customers.

Mike Ritz, Alpha AXPO OEM marketing manager, told Electronic News last week: "The semiconductor operation within Digital, in a short time-frame, will become a separate business unit within our company. What does that mean to the OEM? It means when the semiconductor operation strikes up a partnership, they provide the chips at the same price and in the same timing as they would any internal Digital organization."

Meanwhile, DEC is moving more aggressively in the OEM market with boards based on its 66MHz 21066 and 166Mhz 21068 Alphas and the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus. DEC's new AXPpci33 motherboards carry a list price of $620, but are available at about $375 in 10,000-unit quantities, but the motherboards come without a processor, board memory or plug-in cache. Separately priced are the 21066 processor at $385 and the 21068 at $221 in 5,000-unit quantities.

While the AXPpci-33 motherboards target desktops and low-end servers, DEC is also planning more motherboard announcements in coming months targeting high-end systems. At CeBIT recently in Germany last month, DEC showed the new AXPpci-33 designs as well as VME-bus boards.

The AXPpci-33 motherboard family will offer plug-in cache ranging up to 1MB. The phase-locked loop on the CPU multiplies the 33MHz system clock to the processor speed. Firmware support for either Windows NT or DEC OSF/1AXP for the Unix market will be available.

With the Alpha architecture supporting up to 4MB of plug-in cache, later motherboard introductions will target high-end servers and client systems. The motherboard supports a secondary cache option using 20ns SRAM chips or a high- performance option using 15ns SRAMs. Processor upgrades will be possible through ZIF sockets.

The AXPpci-33 is based on a "Baby AT" format; however DEC sought to provide flexibility with two 32-bit PCI slots, four 16-bit ISA slots and one shared ISA or PCI slot. Other chipsets on the motherboard include Intel's 82378 PCI-ISA, NCR's 53C810 SCSI-2 device and National Semiconductor's 87312 Super I/O.

To boost its Alpha architecture, DEC has been supplying both Japan's Kubota and Italy's Olivetti with systems those companies have been reselling; it also has about 10 existing contract board manufacturing deals involving Alpha design-ins, Mr. Ritz said. One example is the VME-based board for Raytheon, which is involved in the military's J-Stars program.

DEC has developed earlier motherboard designs, such as the AXPeisa150 and AXP300 lines, which were shown to prospective Alpha customers. "Those products have been available for about a year," Mr. Ritz said. "I would say at this point we had been offering those products as a test of the market. We didn't use big fanfare to introduce those to the market, we pretty much kept it as an OEM-only message that we delivered as we contacted the OEMs."

At Elite Group, DEC's latest OEM moves were greeted lukewarmly. Darwin Chang, Elite Group director of marketing, said, "We knew this would happen probably because we've been there before. The same thing was true when we did Sparc with Sun, the same happened with Pentium and Intel." Still, Mr. Chang added that Elite Group and DEC will have a productive relationship. He said Elite Group's Alpha-based motherboard design is now due in late 2Q.

However, while Mr. Chang indicated DEC will not be a volume manufacturer, DEC said the AXPpci-33 motherboards will be manufactured in Ayr, Scotland, where low-end Alpha-based machines are made. "We're still healthy with DEC," Mr. Chang said. "This is good news in the sense that they're going to help us sell some boards. Whether they buy it from us or from one of our competitors--they're not doing board assembly. One way or another someone else has to do it. And if we do it, I'd be happy to, if it's someone else that's fine."