Maynard, Mass. - Oracle Corp. will drive its concept of the network computer forward at its Open World conference in Japan next month when it launches two NC reference designs: one based on Digital Equipment Corp.'s StrongARM implementation and another on the Intel X86.

Though Oracle is keeping the X86 design under wraps until the April 16 event in Tokyo, it went public with the StrongARM reference platform last week. It's pitching the Digital Network Appliance as a more powerful, more standards complaint upgrade of the ARM 7500FE-based reference design, created by U.K.- based Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. and unveiled by Oracle in the summer.

Oracle claims 11 companies licensed and built systems around that earlier design but that the reference platform's relatively low performance and ARM-specific nature limited its appeal.

The 7500FE "had everything from a 28.8-kbit/second modem to 25-Mbit/s ATM interfaces, but they were not industry-standard interfaces," said Jim Lynch, vice president of business development for Network Computer Inc. (NCI), an Oracle spin-off that designs NC software. Systems based on the 7500FE, he said, were suitable for "low-end browsing and light applications" on consumer NCs but not for "substantial Java applications" in a business environment.

In that earlier reference design, the 33-MHz 7500FE integrated chip acted as central processor, video accelerator, memory manager and I/O controller. It ran ARM's RiscOS, used ARM-specific firmware and employed a unified memory architecture that relied on systems memory for frame-buffer chores.

Digital design

By contrast, Digital's design uses the 233-MHz StrongARM and supports PCI and ISA peripherals, including Iomega's Zip drives, popular in some NC designs. The reference platform runs a version of public-domain NetBSD Unix. Tailored for NCs by NCI, it uses firmware compliant with the Open Firmware Initiative. It contains 8 to 64 Mbytes of system memory plus a separate Cirrus Logic graphics chip supporting both TV and SVGA displays and its own frame buffer.

Bill-of-materials costs for the Digital design are said to range from $150 to $250, depending on the configuration.

Digital Equipment will provide the full electric and mechanical specification for the design free as part of its StrongARM sales program.

On the software side, NCI's April launch in Tokyo will include its NC Access software suite, a bundle of systems and applications-level programs designed to act as a complete NC environment. Based on NetBSD, the package includes Oracle's own Web browser, e-mail client and productivity applications as well as support for Java.

NetAccess is expected to ship in volume later this year, Lynch said.

"We will have an Intel reference design as well [at the April event]," Lynch said. "And we will support other hardware architectures as our users demand them."

Two companies have already announced plans to build network computers based on the Digital StrongARM design.

Source: Electronic Engineering Times