RISC vendors await merged code; at Microsoft's WinHEC

Electronic News, April 3, 1995 by Reinhardt Krause

SAN FRANCISCO - While RISC microprocessor vendors were - as usual - largely nonparticipants in Microsoft's Windows hardware Engineering conference (WinHEC), there were indications that Mircosoft is slowly opening the doors a bit wider to Intel's stauch rivals.

Mircosoft chairman Bill Gates, for example, said that "in three or four years" a descendant of the Windows NT operating system could be positioned as a desktop product - as built-in memory for PCs reaches a standard of 16MB. "The market will tell us." he said.

Anne-Marie Larkin, Motorola's director, RISC software engineering, told Electronic News that it may take until 1997 or 1998 for the portable code base between Windows 3.1 and Windows NT to merge.

In the meantime, Motorola is now focused on Windows NT 3.51, which supports PowerPC code. Motorola has about 60 applications that it expects to be available for Windows NT in Q2.

Other Microsoft officials last week revealed that the company is now leveraging a common device driver model for Windows NT and Windows 95. John Ludwig, group manager, Windows 95, said that a key goal of Microsoft is "driver convergende across Windows 95 and Windows NT. He said the common driver model would apply to areas such as LANs, WANs, SCSI and video acceleration such as Microsoft's 3D DDI.

Mircosoft also described more of the plug-and-play features associated with Windows 95 that are being put into Windows NT, whose unit shipments have thus far been disappointing to RISC vendors. Mr. Gates noted that the workstation version of Windows NT is doing better in unit shipments than the server version, which competes with Novell's Netware.

Mircosoft officials last month emphasized that the company now has two design centers. one design center is focused on the consumer market, and is developing new features for Windows 95 and its descendants that home address the need of the home and SOHO markets. This group is also focused on intergration with other home electronics.

The other design center is focused on the corporate market and Windows NT. Mircosoft also indicated last month that it plans to introduce a follow-on to its aborted Winpad operating system for the mobile computing market.

Microsoft did not give much prime time to the Win32 application programming interface, or to the new fix in its Windows NT Workstation 3.51 software (EN, March 6). Version 3.51 is the first to support the PowerPC MPU architecture being pushed by IBM, Motorola and Apple Computer.

The Win32 application programming interface (API) allows independent software vendors (ISVs) to support both the Windows 95 and NT platforms. The recent fix put into Windows NT Workstation 3.51 and Server 3.51, though, will make it easier for 32-bit applications written for Windows 95 to be deployed across Windows NT and into the RISC microprocessors domain.

The Common Controls and Dialogs' introduces elements of support related to the Windows 95 new graphical user interface (GUI). Microsoft had said previously that the older user interface in Windows NT would be upgraded with the "Cairo" release to pick up the Windows 95-style GUI.

Microsoft is still focusing on the third (and final) beta release of the 32-bit Windows 95, with the goal of releasing the operating system in August. As a result, some industry observers have recently questioned how much Microsoft's release of the Cairo upgrade will be impacted. Some now expect that Cairo, which win add object-oriented software techniques, will slip well into 1996.

Michael Slater, publisher of the Microprocessor Report, last week speculated that Microsoft's NT and Windows 95 strategies will merge in the release of an operating system code-named "Memphis" late this decade. Microsoft has been rumored to be investigating very-long instruction word (VLIW) techniques for Memphis, which will be a 64-bit operating system.

In any event, RISC vendors are now braced for a long wait for a move into the mainstream PC market and/or a CPU independent operating system. The software environment that will support a RISC insurgency will not be in place for several years, Mr. Slater said.

Mr. Slater also told a WinHEC audience that one of the biggest obstacles to growing RISC-based system shipments is their requirement for additional memory. The memory premium, he said, outweighs any CPU cost advantages. "You can't buy a $2,000 box to run Windows NT," he said.

While Motorola has taken the lead in porting the Power-PC architecture to Windows NT, Motorola's Larkin declined to reveal if it is cooperating closely with Microsoft on the upcoming Cairo release.

Beefing up its development tools, Motorola RISC Software Engineering during WinHEC announced Firmware 3.0, which introduces a new firmware core and porting architecture.

PowerPC Firmware 3.0 boots the Windows NT, AIX and Solaris operating systems on PowerPC Reference Platform compliant hardware systems. To aid hardware developers to port devices to the PowerPC Reference architecture, Firmware 3.0 isolates all platform-specific code in the porting layer. Motorola said its x86 emulator supports existing PC video hardware through video option ROM emulation. PowerPC Firmware 3.0 also uses compression technology to deliver ROMs under 256KB, which reduces overall OEM system cost.