Yesterday marked the world-wide launch of two new additions to Chelmsford, Massachusetts-based Apollo Computer’s workstation family. Called the Series 4500 and the Series 3500, plugging the mid-range gap between the company’s existing 4 MIPS 4000, and the top-end Prism Series, introduced by Apollo earlier this year. Both are based around the Motorola 68030 chip – rendering Apollo’s proprietary memory management unit obsolete – with the 68882 maths chip, support Ethernet and Token Ring, and run under Apollo’s distributed Unix Domain/OS, offering any combination of the Unix System V release 3, Berkeley Unix 4.3 and Apollo’s own Aegis. Billed as the cheapest 4 MIPS station on the market, the Series 3500 features 25MHz CPU, 68882, 32Mb main memory, and 696Mb of disk. Prices depend upon graphics display configuration, and range from UKP6,600 for a mono version through to UKP8,330 for the two-dimensional colour model; all five models are available immediately. The company reserved the bulk of its enthusiasm for the series 4500, arguing that it represents the first workstation on the market to offer a 33MHz version of the 68030 chip – although it may well not be by the time it becomes availa ble in September. Rated at 7 MIPS, the product boasts no wait state operation and 64Kb of physical cache, integrated to 32Mb of main memory. Apollo also argues that the series 4500 is the first desk top system to offer interleaved main memory, and a doubling of main memory capacity. The product also comes with dedicated graphics pro cessing and floating point acceler ator options, with the latter des igned to up processing speeds by an estimated 300%. The Series 4500 will be available in three configu rations, including the top-end eight-plane two dimensional colour display, with mono prices starting at UKP15,800. The new offerings are fully compatible with its original Series 3000 and 4000 workstations, but will be making tempting up grade kits for both new models available to existing customers.
