Attempting to allay fears that all news out of the company will be bad from here on in, Digital Equipment Corp yesterday launched what it reckons are the two fastest engineering workstations in the industry, pitching them squarely at Hewlett-Packard Co’s market-leading HP 9000 Model 735. The two are the new top-of-the-line models in the DEC 3000 family, the desktop 700 AXP and the deskside 900 AXP. They use the fastest versions of DEC’s Alpha microprocessor, the 275MHz 21064A in the deskside and the 225MHz version in the desktop, and DEC claims that the new Model 700 is 15% faster than the HP 735 Model 125 but costs about one-third less. The 700 costs $27,700 for a 21 screen, 64Mb, 1Gb disk and a CD-ROM drive, delivering 230 SPECfp and 162 SPECint. An entry-level 900 will go for $43,500 with a 21 display, 64Mb and a 2Gb drive and deliver 264 SPECfp and 189.3 SPECint. An upgrade from the 800 to the 900 is $9,000; $6,000 to go from the 600 to the 700. Observers say the boxes, which run OSF/1 and OpenVMS, could be the last Turbo Channel machines. They are expected to be available with new ZLX E2 and E3 accelerators priced respectively at $2,000 and $3,000. DEC also cut the 600 AXP, charging $17,500 for a packaged system most powerful under $20,000. DEC also unveiled a multiprocessor server that clusters between four and 16 Alpha processors. The AdvantageCluster Compute Server 5000 costs $200,000 for the four-processor model and up to $300,000 for the 16-processor version. DEC also said that in October it plans to add a record- breaking server, currently code-nam ed Turbo Laser that will pack up to 12 Alpha microprocess ors to deliver agg regate performance of 3.6 GIPS, 3,000 SpecMarks, 1 GFLOPS from the four-way.
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