Intergraph Corp is using this week’s UniForum show in Washington to launch a new generation of medium-to-high-end workstations, the 6000 Series, rated at 10 to 14 MIPS. Presumably built around the Clipper C300, although Intergraph doesn’t say, all the workstations are colour, and include Intergraph’s new Extensible Display Geometry Engine, Edge, a high performance graphics processor claimed to run at up to 30,000 three-dimensional vectors per second, with 16m simultaneous colours. Looking Glass, the graphical user interface from Visix Software Inc, is also bundled in with the workstations. Running Unix System V Release 3.1, the workstations offer a price-performance improvement of 30% to 40%, according to Intergraph. There are two levels of graphics performance: Edge 1, supporting eight planes and one highlight plane of double-buffered graphics. Edge II provides 24-bit true colour and drawing rates of 400,000 two-dimensional vectors and 350,000 three dimensional vectors per second. Available now, the low-end 6040 systems is rated at 10 MIPS, and costs UKP25,200, comparable with the DECstation 2100, but with more memory (16Mb), disk stroage (180Mb) and graphics (Edge 1). The 6280 is rated at 14 MIPS and costs UKP40,700 in the UK: it has Edge 2 graphics, 16Mb memory and a 670Mb drive. Single and dual workspaces are provided. UniForum previews page three inside.
