Hewlett Packard Co claims it is the first company to ship a Pentium II-based business personal computer with the new Matrox Millennium II two and three-dimensional graphics accelerator. HP dubbed the Vectra VL, which runs Windows 95 or NT, as the industry’s most powerful desktop PC, and claims its new system brings 3D rendering and accelerated video playback to business users. The machines fit mid-way between the low-end VE desktops and high-end XA, XU and XW Intel-based workstations. HP worked with Matrox Corp to optimize the newly-designed 64-bit Millennium II, which has 4MB of dual-ported WRAM Window Random Access Memory, to support higher resolutions, faster refresh rates and color depth support. In a separate move, S3 Inc, the world’s largest supplier of graphics, video and multimedia acceleration hardware, also announced that several of the newest Intel Pentium II-based PCs from AST Inc, Dell Computer Corp, Gateway 2000 Inc and IBM Corp are powered by the company’s ViRGE and Trio families of multimedia accelerators.
