After a number of false starts, Sun Microsystems Inc believes that it has finally got Silicon Graphics Inc beaten fair and square, and is claiming uncontested leadership of the graphics arena, despite Silicon Graphics’s latest pronouncements. Its collaboration with Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp is said to have resulted in a breakthrough three-dimensional graphics accelerator family that is two to three times faster than anything Silicon Graphics currently has. Sun thinks that it will be at least six months before Silicon Graphics can retaliate. It will be the first time that the leading graphics implementation is available on the leading hardware system. The pair are particularly proud of their accomplishment in light of the fact that they are using standard interfaces, standard application programming interfaces and an unmodified Sbus, rather than the proprietary gear Silicon Graphics is said to have claimed it would take to achieve the kind of performance Sun and Evans say they have. They trace their breakthrough to a new architecture and a new generation of chips: the Advanced Micro Devices Inc Am29050 for floating point processing and the VLSI Technology Inc POSE chip for doing rendering. Freedom Series
Evans & Sutherland and Sun Microsystems Computer Corp will market the new Freedom Series jointly; final sales will be from Evans & Sutherland. The accelerators consist of the low-end Freedom 1000 and the flagship Freedom 3000 and can integrate with Sparcstation 2s and 10s under Solaris. The Freedom 3000 reaches speeds of 3m polygons or antialiased vectors a second and is priced from $45,000 to $85,000. The Freedom 1000 is rated between 500,000 vectors per second or polygons per second and 1m vectors per second and polygons per second with prices ranging from $25,000 to $32,500. UK prices have yet to be set. The 1000 reaches a resolution of 1,280 by 1,024. The 3000 goes to 1,536 by 1,280. Hardware-accelerated texture mapping is optional on the 1000. The systems offer binary compatibility with three-dimensional applications written using Sun’s XGL, SunPhigs, Xlib and PEXlib libraries and by extension to Silicon Graphics GL and Ithaca HOOPS as well as Evans & Sutherland SYBYL, AVS and ES/PEX. Deliveries begin next month. The pair are targeting markets such as automotive and industrial design, oil, energy and mineral exploration, scientific visualisation, earth sciences, molecular modelling, avionics, architectural engineering and simulation. The first and the last would be new markets for Sun.
