The Power Macintosh, later Power Mac, is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer as the core of the Macintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006. Described by MacWorld as "the most important technical evolution of the Macintosh since the Mac II debuted in 1987", it is the first computer with the PowerPC CPU architecture, the flagship product of the AIM alliance. Existing software for the Motorola 68k processors of previous Macintoshes do not run on it natively, so a Mac 68k emulator is in System 7.1.2. It provides good compatibility, at about two thirds of the speed of contemporary Macintosh Quadra machines. The Power Macintosh replaced the Quadra, and was initially sold in the same enclosures. Over the next twelve years, it evolved through a succession of enclosure designs, a rename to "Power Mac", five major generations of PowerPC chips, and a great deal of press coverage, design accolades, and controversy about performance claims. It was discontinued as part of the Mac transition to Intel processors announced in 2005, making way for its replacement, the Mac Pro. History RISC exploration (1988–1990) The first Power Macintosh models were released in March 1994, but the development of Power Macintosh technology dates back to mid-1988. Jean-Louis Gassée, president of Apple's product division, started the "Jaguar" project with the goal of creating a computer that would be the fastest desktop computer on the market, capable of voice commands. This was originally envisioned to be a new computer line altogether, not a Macintosh, and the Jaguar team was initially kept independent of the Macintosh team. This separation included operating system development, with the newly-conceived "Pink" operating system considered for the new computer. Jaguar was also not intended to be a high-volume, mainstream system. Gassée's preference, as it was with the upcoming Macintosh IIfx, was to create a product that would compete in the high-end workstation market, previously not an area of strength for Apple. The decision to use RISC architecture was representative of a shift in the computer industry in 1987 and 1988, where RISC-based systems from Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM were significantly outpacing the performance offered by systems based on Motorola's 68020 and 68030 processors and Intel's 80386 and 80486 CPUs. Initially, Apple invested considerable time and effort in an attempt to create their own RISC CPU in a project code-named "Aquarius", even to a point