Keeping up the relentless price pressure at the low end of the workstation market, Hewlett-Packard Co has introduced a new model in its Motorola 68000 family HP9000 Model 300 series of HP-UX Unix stations with a rock-bottom entry price of just $5,500. The Model 340 is based on the 68030 – speed unspecified, but presumably 16MHz – with 68882 floating point co-processor, and Hewlett rates it at 4 MIPS. It comes in two monochrome and three colour configurations. The 340M supports high-resolution graphics on a 17 mono monitor and is pitched at mechanical design and drafting, and software development. The 340MH has a 19 1,280 by 1,024 pixel screen with Hewlett’s enhanced two dimensional graphics with hardware support for vectors and polygon drawing, pixel replication, area pattern fill and bit per-pixel addressing, and is aimed at computer-aided design; it is $8,000. The 340C+ has the same graphics, but adds six colour planes on a 16 1,024 by 768 colour graphics monitor: aimed at electrical engineering logical and physical design, general scientific computing, software development and two dimensional mechanical design applications, it costs $8,500. The 340CH moves up to eight colour planes and two overlay planes on the same 16 screen, and costs $11,000. The 340CHX adds to that an integer graphics accelerator that provides an optimised 32-bit word-co ordinate interface directly to the graphics pipeline, thereby approximately doubling the performance of the Model 340CH, and includes functions such as pan and zoom, and costs $16,000. Prices include 4Mb memory, RS232C and parallel ports, local network interfaces, the HP-UX 6.2 version of Unix, and the X Window System. No ship dates were given, but it sounds as if they are available immediately.
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