IBM Corp has upgraded the graphics facilities for its Intellistation NT workstation range. The company has added the 256-bit Matrox Millenium G400 graphics accelerator to its E Pro, M Pro and Z Pro models. For high-end graphics applications, the company will support Integraph’s Intense3D Wildcat 4000 card.
Dr Satish Gupta, vice president and general manager of the professional workstation products unit in IBM PSG, said that the IBM was steadily growing its workstation sales. In the 1997 to 1998 period, he claimed sales of the units tripled and he expected a very good increase for the 1998 to 1999 period. The reason for this, Gupta said, was that the workstations offered better performance than rivals like Hewlett Packard Co and SGI. He claimed that IBM machines uniformly outperform their HP rivals.
However, Gupta reserved his harshest words for the new SGI workstations, the IBM machines were a lot faster, cheaper and more reliable, he claimed. One customer had told him, Gupta said, that he had chosen the Intellistation over the SGI box because the IBM machine didn’t melt.
The graphics performance of the Intellistations will be further improved by a move to Rambus memory chips in the next generation machines. Gupta said that IBM had tried alternative high-speed memory chips but that Rambus offered the performance needed.
