Hewlett-Packard Co enhances the mid-range of its HP 9000 Series 700 workstation line this week by introducing four new models, and gearing up for the two- and three-dimensional mechanical design market with new colour graphics subsystems, today’s edition of our sister paper Unigram.X reports. In raw performance terms, the new boxes rank below the top three performing Unix desktops, two of which are Hewlett-Packard’s own, but still easily outgun Sun Microsystems Inc, IBM Corp or Silicon Graphics Inc’s best. Configured with the new graphics subsystems, Hewlett-Packard claims it also out does market-leading graphics hardware from Silicon Graphics, Digital Equipment Corp and Sun. Two of the four workstations use a new 100MHz iteration of the 64-bit, bi-endian 7100LC Precision Architecture RISC, first featured in the low-end Geckos launched back in January. The 100MHz 715/100 is rated at 100.1 SPECint92, 137 SPECfp92 and starts at $19,000. The 80MHz 715/80 performs at 83.5 SPECint92, 120.9 SPECfp92 and goes from $13,000. The 64MHz 715/64 – Hewlett’s designated three-dimensional entry-level machine – does 66.6 SPECint92 and 96.5 SPECfp92 and starts at $10,000. Each comes with from 32Mb to 256Mb RAM, 4Gb disk, 17 or 20 colour monitor and is available now. The 100MHz part is also implemented in a Model 725 package – the 725/100 comes with up to 512Mb RAM and will be out in the third quarter. All the new EISA bus machines run HP-UX, which is now up to release 9.05 – that includes the three-dimensional X Window PEX 5.1 run-time extension, and they are fitted with up to 256Kb cache.
