EISA, Texas Style: Canion Talks of Compaq's Plans for Bus
 
Microbytes Daily News Service
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Compaq Computer CEO Rod Canion confirmed last week that his
company will announce a family of EISA-bus products in New York
on November 6 and asserted that EISA will be primarily a high-end
platform for servers and workstations. Bearing in mind Compaq's
midas touch in every product category it has so far attacked,
Canion might cause a few sleepless nights at IBM, DEC, and Sun.
 
In a wide-ranging speech to the New York PC User's group, Canion
demonstrated the company's new LTE notebook computers and
highlighted Compaq's simultaneous moves into both the
high-performance desktop and the "no compromise" laptop sectors
of the market. While he was at it, Canion couldn't resist taking
a few swipes at IBM.
 
What users can expect on November 6 will not be a replay of IBM's
1987 announcement of the Micro Channel Architecture (MCA), Canion
said. "This isn't a new bus that you wonder what you can do
with." In fact, he said, "the bus will be a small part of our
announcement; we'll show a set of products and new peripherals to
address new applications." The systems will "deliver very real
advantages to customers today," Canion said. "In that
environment, theoretical arguments over whose bus is better don't
matter."
 
Nevertheless, Canion took a few shots at MCA. He said Compaq had
already enhanced the AT bus and maintained backward compatibility
with the introduction of the Flex architecture and cache memory.
"In the last two years MCA has competed not with EISA but with an
improved AT bus," he said. "Even so, we do well in comparisons."
The real competition will be with "Micro Channel II or whatever
is next," he said, because "what we introduce will go beyond
what exists in any MCA system now."
 
 
A Threat to Minis
The opening of the EISA era is a major turning point for Compaq.
Canion said that both IBM and Compaq had foreseen
"minicomputer-class applications" for PCs in the future and
both recognized the need for a faster bus to support greater
I/O bandwidth. With EISA, he said, "Compaq is moving out of
the traditional PC arena." That will include not just new
hardware but also software programs, distribution, and
support more typical of minicomputers, he said.
 
Since all the other EISA machines to date have used the 80486
processor, it's a safe bet Compaq's will also. Canion hinted that
the systems might also include bus-mastering disk controllers and
network interfaces. All this adds up to a big-ticket item. Canion
candidly admitted that he doesn't see a role for low-end EISA
systems in the near future. (After all, the Intel EISA chip set
now only supports 80386 and 80486 CPUs.) And he doesn't believe
low-end applications need EISA. (An interesting observation by
itself, in light of IBM's controversial MCA-bus 286-based Model
50.)
 
"Even complex applications are okay in the Flex architecture, and
the 286 and 386 don't really stretch the I/O bus," he said. "But
when you get into SQL and client/server computing, you need more
bus bandwidth. That's where you'll see EISA from Compaq and
others."
 
Asked whether the availability of bus-mastering boards would
determine the commercial success of EISA, Canion responded that
Compaq's initial product offering will include some such boards
but said "it's not a numbers game." The bus wars are not a battle
to the finish, he said, because both 32-bit architectures will
gain adherents. "Over time, as other peripherals are created,
then we can tell how well EISA has delivered," he said, but
applications power, not the number of cards, will be the deciding
factor.
 
It's clear that the battle of the buses has turned into much more
than a wrangling over PC add-in boards or licensing fees. In
Canion's view, the power of the EISA bus is itself Compaq's
doorway into new and larger applications that used to belong only
to minicomputers. And, as usual, Canion's goals for the corporate
jewel he has created are no less ambitious than his technical
dreams. "It's symbolic that we're entering this era at the start
of a new decade," he said. "The lines [between classes of
computers] will increasingly blur, and we'd like to see Compaq
emerge as a leader in the computer market in the broadest sense."
 
                              --- BYTEWeek Staff
 
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