Fabless graphics board vendor 3Dlabs Inc has launched a new accelerator from its Glint 3D range for the NT Workstation market. The Glint MX, the company claims, will double the polygon performance of its predecessors to 1 million polygons per second. The board, working in conjunction with the Glint Gamma technology currently in development, to ship by the end of the year, will extend the rasterization performance of the Glint range for both PCI and Intel Corp’s forthcoming Accelerated Graphics Port AGP systems. It will be available in the second half of the year priced at around $1,000. 3Dlabs also announced OEM design wins for the MX with a number of accelerator board and Pentium II- based system vendors, including Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc, Radius Inc, which will take the board into the Apple Mac market, Elsa GmbH which in turn has just won a deal to supply the MX to Dell Computer Corp for its foray into the NT technical workstation market, and STB Systems Inc’s newly acquired Symmetric Inc unit, as well as hardware system vendors Digital Equipment Corp, and NeTpower Inc. 3Dlabs, which went public last November, has just posted its first quarter results, and saw a profit of $5.4m against losses of $1m last time, on revenues at $15.8m, an impressive jump from $1.8m in the period last year. The company attributed the good performance to an expansion in its OEM business from the likes of Hewlett-Packard Co, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, Compaq Computer Corp, and DEC, as well as growth in the consumer end of the graphic board market, where its Permedia chips sell. It also said that its fabless strategy, using the likes of IBM facilities for manufacturing the Glint range, means that capital is not tied up in running a plant. The Glint Gamma will be launched at the forthcoming Siggraph’97 Expo next August.
