IBM Rolls Out PC Based on PowerPC Chip

IBM on Monday showed off its first personal computers to be based on the PowerPC chip and said the next versions, due next year, will be able to run the operating software of Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh.

The announcement marks another step along a path toward common systems that the two companies have been traveling since they joined to develop the PowerPC microprocessor and some software in 1991.

However, IBM has not decided whether to actually install Macintosh software in its products. If it does, IBM, whose 1980 PC design became an industry standard because others cloned it as well, would itself become a cloner, of Apple.

Armonk, N.Y.-based International Business Machines Corp. and Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple reached agreement last fall on a common design for computers that use the PowerPC chip. That decision was widely seen as meaning that both IBM and Apple software would run on future machines. But the computers that IBM rolled out Monday at the PC Expo in New York do not use that common design and cannot support Apple software. Instead, they can be run by IBM’s AIX program, Microsoft Corp.’s Windows NT and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris programs. IBM is also refining its OS-2 program to work on a PowerPC-based device.

Apple and IBM will publish specifications for the common design of PowerPC-based personal computers this summer, hoping that other companies will also build them.

The chip was conceived as a way to leap over performance limits that the Intel Corp. x86 microprocessors, now the brains of most personal computers, are expected to hit in the coming years.

IBM initiated work on PowerPC and was later joined by Apple and Motorola Inc. IBM has sold advanced workstations that use the chip since late 1993 but has suffered embarrassing delays in getting personal computers ready. Apple last year began switching its Macintosh line to the chip.

Other firms are expected to demonstrate PowerPC-based computers at the trade fair this week.