NCR's New 486 Uses Micro Channel, Bus-Mastering Disk Controller
 
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
NEW YORK (Microbytes Daily News Service) --- With clouds of smoke
and dancing laser beams, NCR yesterday unveiled a fast 486 com-
puter that uses IBM's Micro Channel bus architecture and features
a bus-mastering SCSI controller for disk drives and other
peripherals. The new computer, which starts at $9995, is one of
the few 486-based Micro Channel systems; others include IBM's
Power Platform upgrade to its PS/2 Model 70-A21 and a system from
ALR.
 
NCR's new PC486/MC uses a 25-MHz i486 CPU supplemented with 128K
of cache memory. As in the ALR machine, the cache is contained in
a pair of custom ASIC cache controllers that permit read and
write back operation and can act concurrently for improved
performance. The motherboard can accept up to 16 megabytes of RAM
and offers 4 MCA slots, plus the standard complement of serial,
parallel, keyboard, and mouse ports.
 
The most interesting aspect of the NCR computer may in fact be a
peripheral card, a bus-mastering SCSI controller that permits
operation independent of the main CPU and the connection of up
to 7 daisy-chained peripherals, including disks, printers,
optical drives, and scanners. In the BYTE benchmarks run
yesterday on the NCR PC486/MC, its mass storage subsystem (with a
100-megabyte SCSI hard drive) turned in the fastest performance
yet measured [see below].
 
NCR will offer as an option a bus-mastering graphics coprocessor
board made by GSS (and based on a TI 34010) that provides
high-speed 1024 x 768 graphics independent of the CPU. As
standard, the PC486/MC comes with Super VGA (800 x 600) graphics.
 
NCR said it will start delivering the PC486/MC in December in 4
configurations, ranging from $9995 to $16,995. The entry-level
system will contain 1 megabyte of RAM, a 3.5-inch 1.44-megabyte
floppy drive, and the Super VGA adapter. With 2 megabytes of RAM
and a 100-megabyte SCSI hard drive, the system will sell for
$12,495; the same model with 8 megs of RAM will cost $14,995. The
$16,995 model has 8 megabytes of RAM and a 200-megabyte SCSI
drive.
 
NCR promises a range of Micro Channel systems from the low end
to workstations and servers. The company also said it will
release Micro Channel and SCSI chip sets and token ring
products.
 
 
Preliminary Benchmark Results
Preliminary BYTE benchmark results provide a comparison of
NCR's new system with other 486-based computers. Note the
rating of the NCR, which uses a bus-mastering SCSI controller
for disk drives and other peripherals, in the Disk test. For
all indexes, an 8-MHz PC AT = 1.
 
 
                           BYTE Lab Low-Level Benchmarks
 
                           CPU     FPU      Disk     Video
System:
 
NCR PC486/MC               6.88    22.77    10.76    4.87
ALR PowerCache 4           7.34    21.62     2.40    5.16
Apricot VX FT              6.72    21.95     2.66    5.40
IBM Model 70/A21/486       5.29    21.39     1.75    4.34
 
 
Contact: NCR Corp., Workstation Products Division, 1601 South
Main St, Dayton, OH 45479; (513) 445-5000.
 
                              --- Andy Reinhardt
 
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