Sources inside Hewlett-Packard Co are getting more excited about the company’s forthcoming Snake line of workstations, (CI No 1,599) as the launch, expected within a month, gets closer. The machine will apparently redefine what a desktop workstation is, particularly in terms of graphics, it was claimed. The Precision Architecture RISC-based Snake gets around the performance penalties associated with X Window by incorporating the graphics instructions from the highly regarded Apollo Computer Inc DN10000 RISC machine, which enables the graphics to be scaled along with the architecture. Also from the Apollo machine comes multi-processing support and compiler technology software engineers working on the DN1000 have boosted the Apollo SpecMark from 12.8 when it originally came out up to 18.8, simply by improving the compilers, which incorporate an expert system back-end for dataflow and analysis techniques. Independent software vendors are falling over themselves to get at the machine, said an insider, who also claimed that Snake would be the first machine to pass the 1 SpecMark per MegaHerz barrier, and unlike the rival IBM RS/6000, which is strong on floating point performance but has trouble with compiler and memory management technology, would be a well balanced machine.
