Vaporware - Daystar Turbo 060
Submitted by BDub on January 24, 2004 - 2:41am.
Daystar | Macintosh, 68K | Peripherals
For starters, its best to define vaporware. Quite frankly, vaporware is any announced product or technology that never makes it to market. There are tons of items that fit into the vaporware cloud over the computer industry.
Daystar Turbo 060/Image 060
A featured news item in the May 1994 issue of Macworld, this pair of products were to offer near PowerMac speeds without the need to update your software library. As the name suggests, the up-grade cards use the Motorola 68060 chip. Apple bypassed the 68060 in favor of the PowerPC line. This CPU is the pinnacle of the 68K line of processors - a full super scaler design capable of executing three instructions per clock cycle. In English, it was pretty fast for its intended market. Another interesting detail is that the 68060 instruction set is not 100% compatible with the older 68040. It is believed that the Turbo 060 had an emulator built into the cards ROM for handling the troublesome instructions. Such an emulator is available from Motorola's website.
Daystar had several versions of the cards planned, mainly to accommodate the various PDS slots found in the Mac II and Quadra lines. The initial wave of Turbo 060 cards were aimed at Macs with the Quadra style PDS slot. The high end Turbo 060 would have had a 66 Mhz 68060, some L2 cache, and four 72 pin RAM slots on the card itself. A cheaper 50 Mhz version was mentioned but without any other details. The Image 060 was to be a Turbo 060 with the optional twin DSP daughter card. The DSPs of course further accelerate certain Photoshop functions. While no pictures of the Turbo 060 are floating around on the net, the specs hint of a layout similar to that of the early PowerPro 601 upgrade cards.
The reason the Turbo 060 didn't make it to market is simple - Apple wouldn't let them. The performance of the Turbo 060 rivaled that of the low end PowerMacs even while running PPC native software. Apple had must of the OS running in emulation, hindering the low end PowerMacs further. What Apple wanted was a smooth transition to the PPC line and the Turbo 060 was a threat to Apple's short term plans. Without a license for Apple ROMs on the card, the Turbo 060 was left setting in the laboratory and on a few obscure press releases.