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AST to show Advantage in Vegas

AST will showcase a barrage of new products and technologies at Comdex, including its first set of MMX PCs and some new entry-level servers.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
Brooke Crothers
AST (ASTA) will showcase a barrage of new products and technologies at Comdex, including its first set of MMX PCs and some new Pentium Pro entry-level servers.

AST will demo Advantage multimedia PCs using new DVD players and Intel's upcoming MMX P55C Pentium processor. Compared to current Pentium processors, MMX-enabled Pentiums boost the performance of audio, graphics, and video.

In addition to the Advantage machines, AST will also demonstrate enhanced Ascentia notebooks using both of these technologies.

MMX-enabled Pentium processors will run at 200 MHz for desktop PCs and 166 MHz for notebook PCs. Intel is slated to begin commerical shipments of MMX-enabled Pentium processors in the first quarter of 1997.

AST says it will also introduce new entry-level Manhattan D-Series servers at the show. The servers include a 200-MHz Pentium Pro processor and capabilities such as ultrawide SCSI. The price range is $3,600 to the mid-$5,000s. The servers are slated to be available in December.

To complement the servers, AST will also showcase complete workgroup and Internet solutions.

On the Pentium Pro desktop system front, AST will, for the first time, also show Bravo PCs running applications which convert speech to text.

The company said it will use the Advantage platform to show off Intel's Video Phone technology line, a videoconferencing product that lets users see and hear each other in full duplex over standard phone lines.