Digital Equipment Corp’s expected raft of new MIPS R3000-based systems are to be unveiled tomorrow, and along with two versions of the already flagged Maxine personal workstation, DEC is rolling out a new top-end workstation, three new servers, and various graphics boards, peripherals, software support programs and applications. The products, to be shown at a Bay Area customer event, all feature a modular design, enabling customers to upgrade performance with faster CPU daughterboards, including the MIPS R4000 when it becomes available – probably not until the summer. The two Personal DECstations will be described as the most complete entry-level workstations in the industry: they are the 5000 Model 20 and 25, rated at 16.3 and 19.1 SPECmarks respectively. Both have graphics and upgradability options, and will cost just under $4,000 (UKP3,000 in the UK) for the 20, $5,000 for the 25 in the US, for January delivery. The existing 5000 Model 100 gets an upgrade option to the 33MHz R3000, and R4000 upgrades will also be possible with the older machine. The top-end machine, the 5000/240, is DEC’s most powerful workstation to date, using the MIPS R3000A. For $12,000, it offers graphics performance five times faster than DEC’s previous best, and boosted input-output, integer, floating point and networking performance: available immediately. The three servers are the DECsystem 5000/25, 5000/240, and 5900 models, the first two aredesktops costing $5,000 and $13,500, the last a database server supporting up to 35Gb storage, costing $59,000. All are Adavanced Computing Environment-compatible, said DEC. The Microsoft Corp Win 32 New Technology operating system will again be demonstrated at the user bash, and DEC said it would run NT across the range, as well as the OSF/1-based Open Desktop environment.
