FirePower Powerized MX

The PowerPC shines under multimedia lights

In theWindows NT marketplace, the PowerPC has a place: multimedia. Here the PowerPCcan put its floating-point RISC power to work on CPU-intensive tasks such as 2Dand 3D graphics rendering, video capture (with encoding and decoding),digital-linear editing, and CAD. With a price/performance point better thanstandard Pentium systems and even in line with the new Pentium Pro machines, youneed PowerPC systems on your list of powerful multimedia developmentworkstations to look at this year.

Add symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) to this already potent architecture,and you have the FirePower Powerized MX. FirePower, a company that providessystem boards to companies such as IPC Technologies, was the first to market SMPboards using PowerPC chips. Now, FirePower offers complete systems that OEMssell. Because FirePower does not sell directly to end users, the prices in thisarticle are estimated street prices.

Although the PowerPC processor does not have the wealth of nativeapplication software that the Pentium has, more is coming out all the time, andthe emphasis is definitely on multimedia packages. (Microsoft plans to release atrue Win32 Intel-emulator for all RISC platforms some time in 1997.) Companiessuch as in:sync (with Speed Razor Mach III for video editing) and Avid (withElastic Reality for 2D morphing) have formidable chunks of software formultimedia development on the PowerPC. Other hardware and software vendors havecome out with video capture and conferencing products, such as VideoPhone fromConnectix, for the corporate environment.

Everything You Need
On one compact board, FirePower has all the I/O capabilities, video, andsound you need, as figure 1 illustrates. This solution reduces the number ofperipheral cards you need to install to build a fully functional system. Infact, you probably won't need to install any.

On its standard PCI bus, FirePower has embedded Fast SCSI-2 (with internaland external connectors), Digital's 10 Base T Ethernet (with an external RJ-45connector), and a "riser card" that provides two PCI and two ISA (twohalf-length and two full-length) expansion slots that are perpendicular to thesystem board. It also has an embedded enhanced IDE controller, two DB9 serialports, one DB25 enhanced parallel port, and PS/2-style keyboard and mouseconnectors. But, because the system is in a desktop case, it doesn't have manydrive bays (the low number of card slots is not as big a problem, becauseeverything you need is already on the system board). It has space for oneinternal half-height 3.5" drive, with two front-access half-height 5.25"bays (a 4X CD-ROM drive takes up one), and two half-height 3.5" bays (thefloppy drive takes one).

The system board has full integrated audio support, giving you Digital AudioTape (DAT)- and CD-quality sound input and output (a Crystal Semiconductorfull-duplex codec provides 48-KHz and 44.1-KHz stereo at 16 bits). It has stereoins and outs, with microphone and headphone and line levels (four connectorstotal), so you get all the connectivity, hardware, and software (includingdrivers) you need for multimedia and Web applications, conferencing, and (shhh!)games.

Video, however, is where the FirePower MX really shines. It uses a customchipset on a 66-MHz 128-bit memory bus, rather than on the 33-MHz 32-bit PCIbus, for accelerated graphics and video capture (which is something you don'tfind on most desktop workstations). The four dual-ported VRAM SIMM slots for upto 4MB of memory can support a resolution of 1024x768 pixels at 24-bit color, or1280x1024 at 16-bit color.

Integrated video capture is available without your having to add anexpensive third-party card. So, you can use your NT system as a video phone,video conferencing system (using NT's built-in networking and no extra hardwareor software), or video editing station. The FirePower MX has a single RCA inputjack for composite video. This jack attaches to a heavy-duty video samplingsubsystem. Also on the memory bus, a 64-bit Philips Video controller (capable ofoperating in NTSC and PAL formats, with multimode support) can capture anuncompressed full-screen (640x480), full-color (24-bit), full-motion,60-fields-per-second (30-frames-per-second, dual-field) video stream. Two VRAMSIMM slots provide up to 2MB of frame storage. With Windows NT's Fast and WideSCSI-2 support, you have to add only an audio/video (A/V) hard drive ormultidrive stripe set (and appropriate controller, such as an Adaptec 2940W),and you're ready to turn your workstation into a full-fledged digital-linearvideo editing system. Or, you can use your regular hard drive to capture smallvideo streams for conferencing and training applications.

What's more, the PowerPC 604's 32-bit floating point-performance (see graphA in "Buy the Numbers," on page 69) with the FirePower MX's memory andbus architecture make this system ideal for such applications as MPEG encodingand decoding. In fact, this system can do in software (such as with theshareware program, Berkeley MPEG Encoder) what most other machines need a $5000add-in card to do, and in some cases, this solution is even faster.

Processors and Memory
You can configure the FirePower MX with one or two CPUs and clock speeds of100, 120, 133, or 150 MHz. Depending on the applications you're running,investing in the second processor can be worthwhile.

Although the operating system and drivers are optimized for an SMP system,not many PowerPC-native applications can use a dual-processor architecture. Somepackages, though, such as PhotoMorph from North Coast Software, are designed forSMP, and more are being released all the time. But beyond the OS multitasking ofindividual processes, you won't be able to take advantage of multiple CPUs rightaway. To really put NT's 32-bit multithreaded power to work for you in thefuture, you need specialized graphics applications (3D animation and rendering,CAD, etc.) that specifically support SMP.

The CPUs sit on a 66-MHz, 64-bit bus, so data throughput to their shared512KB Level 2 cache is fairly high (a larger dedicated cache for each CPU wouldspeed things even more, but the change in architecture would undoubtedly requirea much higher price). This bus is bridged to the system's double-wide 128-bitmemory and asynchronous I/O buses, giving applications simultaneous access tocompute, memory, and I/O resources. You can handle compute- and memory-intensivetasks such as animation and video capture through the operating system andstandard hardware, instead of having dedicated peripherals (capture cards,graphics accelerators) process and store information.

Our test system came with 64MB of RAM, but the FirePower MX can access upto 256MB of error-correcting code (ECC) memory through eight SIMM slots. Forimaging applications, 64MB is probably all you need for optimum performance,without breaking your bank account.

A Speedy System
The FirePower MX is a speedy system. Our test unit had two 150-MHz 604s. Inlab tests, its performance was right in line with other equivalently configuredPowerPC systems (see graph A in "Buy the Numbers," above). Again,larger independent caches for each CPU would improve its performance, but thefast-and-wide memory bus makes up for this shortcoming. The FirePower MX is moreexpensive than either of the other two PowerPC systems the Windows NTMagazine Lab tested (an IPC PowerPlay and a Motorola PowerStack) becauseof the SMP board and second processor. Although the FirePower MX was a littleslower than the Motorola in the Elastic Reality test, remember that OS overheadis involved in supporting multiple CPUs, and this program is not optimized forSMP. SMP applications such as PhotoMorph can take advantage of this system'sarchitecture, and the small shared cache is not a deterrent.

In addition to processing power, the FirePower MX has extensive multimediacapabilities, but there is a catch. Although this system has the hardware fortelevision-quality video capture, you need to make sure you provide it with anappropriate place to put the data. We found that the system's standard FastSCSI-2 hard drive is not up to the task, so you will need to get at least adedicated A/V drive and controller to do full-screen full-motion video. A bettersolution is a Fast and Wide PCI SCSI-2 controller (2940W) and a four-drivestripe set because even most A/V drives can't sustain the 20MBps bandwidth of afull-motion video stream.

The system can still work with the files (previously digitized sequences).But to store the stream and output the final product, you need a dedicated drivethat can maintain a consistent, yet very high, data transfer rate, and a tapestorage device. The software that comes with the computer can compress the videostream so you don't overwhelm even an A/V drive (which is as fast as they come),but even compression isn't enough with only a standard SCSI-2 disk system. Note,though, that at smaller screen sizes or lower frame rates, the capture worksjust fine.

This problem was the only one we ran into with the FirePower MX. Thesoftware that comes with the system is enough to get you started doingmultimedia (such as limited edition video conferencing and capture programs, anddemos of morphing and desktop publishing software). Once you whet your appetitewith these applications, you'll probably want more sophisticated packages fordigital-linear video editing, 2D morphing, enterprise network videobroadcasting, etc.

The advantages of SMP, and especially of a powerful RISC microprocessorsuch as the PowerPC, is that you can keep processor-intensive tasks such as 3Drendering (using NT's included OpenGL routines) on the CPU, instead ofoffloading them to extra accelerated graphics cards. The system can handle allthese tasks in its main CPUs. Properly programmed and multithreaded graphicsapplications will give you performance rivaling much more expensive workstationsand even Alpha-based systems.

Consider the Alternatives
Multimedia developers need to know that alternatives to Pentium-basedsystems can offer much better performance without a huge price increase. And,corporate users need to know that one standard configuration can give you fullin-house video-based training, network conferencing, and more.

With all the packages vendors are porting to the PowerPC, it makes a goodhigh-speed office automation and desktop publishing system, too. Integratedaudio and I/O capabilities will fit into future computer telephony,voice-response, and faxing technologies, and because this system is fullyPowerPC Reference Platform-compliant, it won't be outdated any time soon.