Division Group Plc has finally sold its PFX high-end graphics technologies to its partner in the venture, Hewlett-Packard Co for $6m less expenses, but plus unspecified royalties. UK-based Division’s marketing director Pierre duPont said in May it was looking to sell the technology as it couldn’t depend on HP to do their bit and added somewhat audaciously that it would give HP a future that they need. Hewlett considers itself king of the graphics system castle at the moment with the recent announcement of the first PA-8000 RISC-based graphics workstations (CI No 2,927). Division and Hewlett have worked for two years with a team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on the PFX hardware, based on PixelFlow technology that Division licensed from the University (CI No 2,460). The 25 people at Chapel Hill will join Hewlett’s workstations group. PFX uses a so-called massively-parallel-processor-per-pixel approach to achieve super-fast three-dimensional graphics. Division also resold Hewlett workstationas as part of the deal – greatly annoying its other partner, Silicon Graphics Inc (CI No 2,878), but there was nobody available to clarify what will happen in future. Hewlett said the first products using PixelFlow will arrive next year and Division will concentrate on its DVS and dVise virtual reality run-time and authoring software. The markets got wind of the possible sale back in December (CI No 2,812), so Division shares rose only a penny to 80p at the news yesterday.
