Having given up on its over-ambitious ES-1 supercomputer project, Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp has returned to its last and come out with the ESV series of five Unix workstations built around 25MHz versions of MIPS Computer Systems’ R3000 RISC processor. Claimed to be the first industry implementation of the extended, three-dimensional version of the PHIGS graphics standard – PEX – which runs under X Window, they use AT&T signal processors to support the hard-wired version of PEX, and to achieve parallelism. The low-end ESV5 performs at 277,000 depth-queued vectors per second and 19,000 polygons per second, which rises to one million vectors and 100,000 polygons per second on the top-of-the-range ESV50. The 10,240 by 8,192 resolution is achieved using Cleanline technology, the successor to the Salt Lake City company’s existing Shadowfax anti-aliasing raster technique. Rated at 20 MIPS and 8 MFLOPS the new workstations come with from 8Mb to 128Mb memory and up to 2.4Gb disk. They start at $49,000 for the ESV5, $85,000 for the ESV50, next month.
