Hewlett-Packard Co says it canned its high-end Visualize PxFl graphics subsystem – its supposed SGI-killer – because there were too few companies with more than $500,000 to spend on the technology that were not already Silicon Graphics Inc customers (CI No 3,336). It had precisely no orders for the unit. HP says it’s been finding other jobs or writing severance packages for Visualize PxFl’s 25-strong Chapel Hill, North Carolina research and development team. HP spent $6m on buying a license to Pixel Flow from its UK developer Division Group Plc and a bunch more dollars productizing it. HP says the PxFl parallel and per-pixel shading technologies will be integrated into future hardware. Its current generation of Visualize graphics accelerator boards do not incorporate it. PxFl software enables an image to be managed before it goes to the CPU effectively off-loading some floating- point intensive tasks to a pre-processor simulation environment. HP’s Visualize FX2, FX4 and FX6 accelerators – with two, four and six floating point calculation units respectively – process 3D graphics tasks on the company’s multiprocessing Kayak Intel boxes and PA-RISC systems. FX6 works only in conjunction with PA-RISC systems as Intel-powered systems simply cannot draw graphics faster enough to take advantage of the high-end board. Even if it could configure Kayaks with FX6 HP said it figured trying to sell a $30,000 PC would be a non-starter. It says it will continue to support Pex, Phigs and StarBase graphics library users in future version of its FX Unix technologies in addition to OpenGL and the new 3D architecture it is creating with SGI and Microsoft Corp – see separate item in Top Stories section.
