
Radius speculated, publicly, that they could provide a PowerPC-based
Rocket for existing Macs. It would have the plus of RocketShare and
the minus of NuBus accelerators - no true boot off the accelerator,
NuBus bottleneck to video and other I/O.

Apple, it seems, will not compete with third parties here -- except
perhaps for not-yet-available Macs like Cyclone, where a PowerPC
slot might be advertised. Look for Daystar and such to make PowerPC
accelerators.

One potential problem with any accelerator, though, is that it will
need a ROM companion and Apple has licensed only Radius, with
Rocketshare, to use any of its proprietary code.

Apple is, between the lines, trying to let us know that PowerPC Macs
will have simplified logic boards due to the magical nature of RISC
and that these boards should be much cheaper to build than those in
existing 68040 Macs. Perhaps, then, we'll see groundbreaking
prices in Mac-logic board upgrades, much the same way we've seen
much cheaper high-performance CPUs this year.

First generation PowerPCs, 98601s, will also hopefully have socketed
CPUs so that they'll be chip upgradeable to 98604s a year later.
This should be possible in much the same way that 486s can be pulled
for clock doublers. If there is too much technical   baggage (which
I doubt since the external busses are the same size/width) to do
this, perhaps we can have CPU daughterboard, a la Powerbook, as
standard to facilitate better CPU upgrades. This is an area where
Apple has fallen far behing the Intel-based world. Perhaps catchup
is in order.

By the way, last week's PC week had an excellent story on PowerPC,
Pentium, MIPS R4000, DEC Alpha (the big four on the microprocessor
front for the forseeable future). Worth reading for technojunkies.
Also, the latest PC has a cover story on Pentium. Read it, and all
the other stories about how Intel is unstoppable and preeminent
right now.

Once anyone is this secure, they are due to fall. Intel's market
position will never again be as dominant as it is today (especially
if AMD gets the go ahead to sell its 486s this week as it appears it
might). The competition from all fronts is gearing up for an awesome
battle. Apple users should be excited that PowerPC, while not
guaranteed dominance, is a guaranteed winner, even if its one of
several.