Thomas A. Beaver

Corporate VP & Director of World Marketing, Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector, Motorola

by Timothy Haight

Thomas A. Beaver has recently taken on a new position in world-

wide marketing for Motorola, but until this summer he headed the company's participation in making PowerPC chips, along with IBM and Apple. That series of chips is a success thus far, Beaver says, with more than a million computers sold, IBM shipping units and new chips coming out on or ahead of schedule.

IBM and Motorola recently renewed their joint hardware production effort, which began in 1992, extending their contract to jointly operate their Somerset PowerPC development facility for another three years. Beyond the PowerPC 604, which is just now appearing in high-end machines, comes the multitasking 620, where individual chips are expected to be half again as fast. Then there are the chips beyond that. "PowerPC isn't just a desktop solution," Beaver says. "PowerPC chips are now or soon will be in games, ATM networking equipment, PDAs and embedded systems in automobiles. This is a long-term effort. Cellular started in 1988 and took six or seven years to take off. We're very happy with our progress."

Beaver sees the increasing bandwidth in the wide area network, such as ATM, leading to "a whole bunch of server classifications--video on demand, home shopping, graphics-intensive, game archives. The future of Blockbuster Video is as a server." The obstacle to this vision is the need for standards.

Most Important Trend: The emerging ubiquitous high-bandwidth network

Most Dis turbing Trend: Lack of standards in delivering broadband services to the home

NetPeeve: Internet junk mail

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September 15, 1995