These RISC processors, which can run a variety of operating systems, are turning up in more and more platforms.

By Dan Deitz, Associate Editor

When Apple, IBM, and Motorola announced their intention to jointly develop a new RISC-based microprocessor in 1991, some computer industry analysts saw the effort as the most serious challenge yet to Intel's leadership in the worldwide microprocessor market. Since then, the result of the collaboration, the PowerPC, has hardly put Intel out of business. Further, the chip has had to battle not only Intel's Pentium line but also a handful of other reduced-instruction-set computer, or RISC, chips--such as the Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) Alpha, the Hewlett-Packard (HP) PA-RISC, the MIPS R4x00, and the Sun SPARC--to win the hearts and minds of software developers, who have limited resources to devote to porting their programs to a plethora of hardware platforms.

Even so, by some indications the PowerPC chip is succeeding. It currently powers a wide variety of platforms, including Apple's Power Macintosh and some of the models in IBM's POWERpersonal and RISC System/6000 computer lines. Moreover, a new family of IBM POWER GXT series graphics boards are based on the chip, as well as several models in IBM's 7586 industrial computer line. IBM even expects to use the chips in its POWERparallel massively parallel supercomputers. The chip's uses are also being extended outside the computer industry to embedded control applications in automobiles, consumer electronics, machine-tool controllers, and other areas.

Demand for the chip is now so strong that IBM has announced plans to build a new plant to manufacture PowerPCs in Manassas, Va. In fact, Apple had to ramp up production of its Power Macs last year to meet market demand.

Of course, engineers don't buy computers just because of the chips they contain. A wide array of issues come into play in the purchase decision, including networking features, disk capabilities, compiler performance, and graphics capabilities. Even so, as competition heats up even further in the engineering workstation market following Intel's Pentium Pro announcement last November and the introduction of new RISC CPUs by DEC, HP, MIPS, and Sun, PowerPC-based platforms deserve a look.

"The PowerPC has been moving in the right direction," said Bob Brandenstein, platform marketing manager at EDS Unigraphics, in Maryland Heights, Mo. "The performance of the latest PowerPC chip, the 604, has improved dramatically, the graphics cards are better performers and more reasonably priced, and the chip appears to have a lot of room for growth."

"It's hard to predict which chips will be around tomorrow," he added. "But it looks like the PowerPC will be one of them."

"Just by looking at the requests we're getting from our customers, I think we've got a good potential market for our MicroStation Modeler among Power Mac users," said Lu Han, technical lead for MicroStation Modeler at Bentley Systems Inc. in Exton, Pa. "Some of our customers think that Power Macs are good platforms for industrial design applications, which are quite computation-intensive because of the need to generate complex solids and surfaces."

This engine design was created on a Macintosh computer with MicroStation and rendered with MicroStation Masterpiece.

One of the PowerPC's strengths is its floating-point processing capabilities, which are critical to computation- and graphics-intensive engineering applications, such as finite element analysis (FEA), computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM), and photorealistic rendering. Even so, applications that aren't native to the PowerPC--that is, programs that haven't been fine-tuned to take advantage of the chip's features--obviously won't run as fast as those that are.

Many engineering programs are native Unix applications, while most office-automation and personal-productivity programs are native Windows applications. PowerPC chips can run nonnative software in emulation mode "pretty fast," according to Sergey Solyanik, a software developer at Bentley. Because of the controversy surrounding the usefulness of benchmarks that measure computer processing speeds, engineers shopping for a computer should run critical software on the platforms that have made their short list to make sure that performance is acceptable.

"Right now, the lack of native applications is hampering the PowerPC," Solyanik added. "However, the 604 is a very fast chip, and it's very competitive with what Intel has to offer. The potential definitely is there."

Although the PowerPC's floating-point capabilities are seen by many software developers as outstanding, the chip also functions well when running applications that don't depend so heavily on such capabilities.

"Manufacturing resource planning and other database-intensive applications don't need the floating-point power that 3-D graphics applications do, but they do require industrial-strength Unix and support for multiple users in a mission-critical environment," said Keith Laytham, manufacturing segment manager for the RS/6000 division of IBM in Armonk, N.Y. "Such programs have multiple levels of application, file, and graphical-user-interface processors, which also require very powerful computers. The PowerPC performs very well in all these areas."

The scalability of IBM's PowerPC-based systems is another potential advantage. "The use of PowerPC chips in IBM products runs all the way from the smallest handheld systems up to supercomputing server clusters," said Bill Fleming, IBM's graphics brand manager for the RS/6000 line. "As a result, our customers have just one architecture and one set of software tools that they need to become familiar with, and they can select a system with just the range of power that they need."

A significant potential benefit of the PowerPC is its support for multiple operating systems. PowerPC-based systems can run the Mac OS, Solaris, Unix, and Windows NT. "Right now, we're seeing interest in Windows NT, which requires a very powerful processor," Laytham said. "Because it's so powerful, the PowerPC 604 is a natural to support Windows NT.

"One of the major debates going on in the market for industrial applications, for example, is whether Unix or Windows NT will dominate," he added. "Going with PowerPC-based systems enables our customers to hedge their bets. Most run Unix software on the plant floor today, but with PowerPC technology, they can shift to Windows NT without a penalty if they choose to in the future."

One direction IBM's industrial customers are taking is to run AIX software on PowerPC-based servers and to use Windows NT-based POWERpersonal computers as clients. "We're seeing significant demand for this type of arrangement," Laytham said.

One reason is that such a configuration helps customers protect their initial investments in hardware. "As customers need more powerful systems, they buy the next generation of RS/6000 servers and then use the existing servers as Windows NT clients," Laytham added.

Like IBM's implementations of the PowerPC, Apple's PowerPC-based Power Macintosh computers also support multiple operating systems, in this case the Mac OS, Unix, and Windows. (Additional software and computer boards may be needed to run Unix and Windows, however.) Purchasers of Power Macs generally don't buy the machines just because of their processing capabilities, though; the Mac OS and its tight integration with the hardware typically are just as important.

Because of Apple's relatively small presence in the engineering market (Macintoshes constitute about 12 percent of the market for engineering computers), in contrast to its domination of the desktop-publishing market, many engineers don't see the Mac as an engineering platform. However, the Mac has a devoted following in the engineering community, and anyone considering PowerPC platforms should take a closer look at the Mac OS and the software developed for it.

"In the engineering community, in companies large and small, we find a group of people who are dedicated to Apple hardware because it's so easy to use," said Mehran Lashkari, a vice president of engineering at Los Angeles-based Structural Research and Analysis Corp. (SRAC).

"They love the operating system and the graphical user interface, and they just don't want to work with any other kind of computer." Lashkari estimated that about five percent of SRAC's FEA software is sold for the Mac OS. The company currently is working on a version of its COSMOS/FFE finite element analysis technology for the Mac. It expects to release the software later this year.

This design of a constant-velocity joint for an automotive drive train, which was created with MicroStation Modeler, can be exported to FEA programs, rendering packages, and work processing software, making it easier for engineers to communicate among themselves and with corporate management or customers.

Bentley, which already offers accelerated native CAD/CAM software for Macintosh systems, is preparing a Power Macintosh version of its parametric, feature-based 3-D CAD/CAM system, MicroStation Modeler. Its software developers have identified a number of ways that the Mac OS could be exploited for engineering applications.

"For example, Apple has come out with 3DMF (for 3-D metafile), a 3-D clipboard that's integral to its graphics software, QuickDraw 3-D," said Mike McCreavy, a software developer at Bentley. "It's an excellent means of transferring complex 3-D geometries--including any texture maps and related data--across applications." The 3DMF feature, which is built into the Mac OS, transfers 3-D graphics from application to application, preserving not only their geometric information but also their lighting, shading, and textures.

"The Macintosh's rendering capabilities are also impressive," said Bentley's Lu Han. "Our rendering package, MicroStation Masterpiece, takes advantage of the Mac OS to create high-quality, photorealistic renderings."

"Apple has a low-level interface to its hardware accelerators for rendering triangles," added McCreavy. "That's one of the tools software developers could use to generate rendered images faster." Apple recently announced 3-D graphics accelerators for PCI-based Power Macs that can speed such applications by up to a factor of 12.

Other features of the Mac OS include its support for the drag-and-drop feature and for AppleScript. "Drag and drop is a really clean way to make the cut-and-paste feature transparent to users," McCreavy said. "And AppleScript lets you record keystrokes and other ways of interacting with a program so that you can automate functions by playing back the recorded scripts." Given that fewer engineering packages are available for the Mac OS than for Unix or Windows NT, why does the Mac retain such a committed following among some engineers?

"After I entered private practice, one of my first consulting clients suggested that if I needed a computer, I should consider a Macintosh," said Christopher Wright, a mechanical engineer in private practice in Minneapolis who consults on structural mechanics, mechanical design analysis, pressure vessel design, and failure investigation. "I had to write a proposal that night, and he gave me an old Mac to try out. I took it back to my hotel room, and in about 15 minutes, I'd set up the computer, installed Microsoft Word, and was writing the proposal. Soon, I bought my own Mac, and I've been using Macs ever since."

By now it's virtually a cliche that Macs are easy to use. Wright suggested that there are two basic reasons why the computers have gained this reputation. "First, the Mac OS is very tight--the basic OS functions are all very intuitive and don't require any tinkering when you start out or make hardware or software changes. You don't have to go through many steps to get things done," he said. "Apple's interface guidelines make a variety of functions common across all software packages, so there isn't a steep learning curve for Macintosh software." The first time he used a Mac FEA program, he said, "it wasn't until I'd gotten pretty far into using the program that I finally had to pick up a manual. That's a common characteristic of a well-written Mac program: You learn by doing."

The second reason, Wright said, is that the Mac makes transferring data between programs extremely easy. "For instance, I often run ANSYS remotely on different computers using Versaterm Pro, a VT100/Tektronix 4107 emulator," Wright said. "Data flow very easily to and from all the charting, test-processing, and number-crunching software I need for pre- and postprocessing, and through Versaterm to and from the remote computer."

The Mac's data-transfer capabilities are particularly valuable when Wright has to present analysis data to a client. "Computer plots of postprocessed FEA data can be pretty sterile, so I have to run them through a graphics program to remove some of the clutter and draw my client's attention to areas of interest," Wright said. "In the case of a pressure vessel, for example, I might translate raw stress data from an ANSYS run into primary, secondary, and peak-stress components with a spreadsheet, chart the results with graphing software, and combine the chart with a model plot using a drawing program to summarize ASME code compliance requirements in a single picture," he added. "I can do the same thing with equilibrium checks, weld analyses, frequency-response analyses, and vibration tests."

One of the Mac's most powerful features, Wright said, is its scripting capability--in essence, a way of writing a program to control the functioning of other programs. "When I download e-mail from ASME's Mech Eng bulletin board system (BBS), I use a script that takes the compressed e-mail from the BBS, decompresses it with the StuffIt program, boots up my e-mail reader, and deletes all of the intermediate scratch files. Thus, all I have to do to read my e-mail is press a key."

HyperCard software offers additional ways for Macintosh users to automate computer tasks. The software, which links data and organizes processes much as a hypertext web browser links Internet sites, enables users to organize a wide variety of information in different forms (audio, graphics, text, and video) into files, or "stacks," and then to link these stacks to other programs.

For example, Wright organizes client names, addresses, and job IDs into stacks so that they can be read by Microsoft Word's print-merge module. "When I need to correspond with a client, HyperCard will automatically launch Word and export the information so that the first thing I see is my Word file with the client's name, address, and project number already in the document," he said. "All I have to do then is to write the letter." In addition to producing correspondence, Wright uses HyperCard features to generate invoices, keep track of bibliographical information, dial and log telephone contacts, and produce mailing labels, among many other applications.

Additionally, HyperCard, which also performs some math functions, can be used for engineering applications. "I have a stack that performs section-property calculations for beam stress analysis," Wright said. "Each card in the stack has fields that contain geometry for the elements making up the section--two flanges and the web in an I-section, for instance." When he clicks a button on the card, the stack calculates and displays all the properties for the composite section, based on the element geometry.

"Another button click will export the data to a text file for FEA command-file editing," he added. "The stack also has cards that calculate properties for commonly used elements, such as rectangles and circles, and others that determine torsional stiffness. HyperCard isn't rocket science, but it does great things for my productivity." Wright said that he uses a similar HyperCard stack to calculate the area and design properties of weld and fastener groups. "HyperCard determines the areas of all the individual fasteners in a bolt pattern, say, and then it calculates the polar moment of inertia and section modulus to determine how loads get distributed to resist bending moments," he said.

This Power Macintosh 9500, outfitted with a 120- or 132-MHz PowerPC 604, 16-768 MB of RAM, 2-4 MB of video RAM, and a 1024-by-1280 monitor, is one of many possible configurations for an Apple engineering workstation.

Although similar tools are becoming available for other platforms, Wright is optimistic about the Mac's future. "I'm particularly excited about OpenDoc, which has the potential to take Microsoft's OLE feature a step further by linking programs functionally rather than simply linking the results," he said. "Engineering software tends to be very specialized, and much of it--FEA software in particular--gets more and more complex to be all things to all engineers. As a result, engineers are trying to automate their work by creating customized systems.

"OpenDoc would let you combine pieces of programs to achieve this goal--for example, by linking an FEA solver for predicting pipe stress to the piping-layout module of a CAD program," he said. "If you were designing appurtenant structures or supports, you could use the same solver and link it to pre- and postprocessors for steel or concrete design.

"I've also seen some exciting demonstrations in which computations are done in an Excel spreadsheet and the results--control-function calculations as well as motions and forces--are fed into the Working Model rigid-body dynamics solver to control the movement of a mechanism," he added. In such applications, OpenDoc--which is still in beta testing--offers a way to "assemble a suite of integrated software tools," he added, "except that the suite would be organized in accordance with the needs of the user, not a commercial software developer." Such a suite could include a CAD program's sketching module, an FEA preprocessor from one package, a shareware FEA solver, a fracture-mechanics postprocessor from another package, a spreadsheet for performing ASME Pressure Vessel Code calculations, a graphics program, and a word processor.

"The nearest thing I had to a mentor taught me that engineering is the process of communicating instructions based on scientific and mathematical principles to artisans so that they can take the materials found in nature and give them a specific usefulness," Wright said. "Tools such as OpenDoc show how the Macintosh can help me write, draw, calculate, and present engineering instructions so that others will understand exactly what's needed and know whether the work is done properly."

Engineers are rightfully excited about the possibilities for enterprise-wide information sharing offered by Windows NT and about Intel's Pentium Pro family of CPUs, which many observers say offer dazzling performance. The question that many engineers now have is whether--and how quickly--Intel and Microsoft will come to dominate the market for engineering hardware and software.

For most of its history, engineering computing has bucked the trends observed in the office-automation and personal-productivity markets, where Intel and Microsoft rule the roost. By contrast, the engineering market has been far more eclectic, supporting many market niches and offering an amazing array of choices in hardware and software.

With the backing of IBM and Apple for the PowerPC, the recent announcement of new chips by the largest vendors of engineering computers, and continued staunch support for the Mac OS among some engineers, that's as true today as ever. If the PowerPC chip--or one or all of its rivals--and the operating systems that they support continue to thrive and expand their bases, engineers seem sure to preserve their freedom of choice.

Engineers with access to e-mail and the World Wide Web can obtain additional information on the PowerPC chip and on engineering applications for the Macintosh operating system at the following addresses:

For information on the PowerPC: http://www.mot.com/PowerPC/

For access to information on Apple's Power Macintosh computers:

For product information on IBM's RS/6000 computers, POWER GXT graphics accelerators, and 7586 industrial computers: http://www.austin.ibm.com

For data on Working Model for the Macintosh:

For updates on MicroStation Modeler for the Power Macintosh:

For information on Structural Research and Analysis Corp.'s COSMOS/M and COSMOS/FFE finite element analysis software for the Macintosh: info@srac.com

For access to the Macintosh Scientific and Technical Association:

For a Macintosh software catalog: http://web.nexor.co.uk/public/mac/archive/welcome.html

For access to Macintosh users at the NASA Lewis Research Center:

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