Intergraph (Great Britain) Ltd is seeking UK and continental value-added resellers for its high-performance Unix workstations – top models based on the Fairchild Clipper chip set, soon to be owned by Intergraph – for the first time. As reported briefly (CI No 781), it is also instituting a Partnership Software Programme to increase the number and variety of packages that are available for the stations – Intergraph currently has a library of 400. The company also announced 10 new configurations of the Unix and Clipper-based 32C workstations. The new workstations are colour and categorised by two levels of performance: the 200 series with 5 MIPS and the 300 series with higher performance and consequently a higher price. A 200 series desktop InterPro 220 with 8Mb RAM, 156Mb internal hard disk, 1.2Mb floppy disk, Ethernet communications interface and 1,184 by 884 resolution 19 screen displaying 32 colours simultaneously from a palette of 4,096 will cost around UKP25,000. The top-of-the-line InterAct 360 with 80Mb RAM, 156Mb hard disk, 1.2Mb floppy disk, dual 19 screens with the same resolution as the 220 but displaying 512 colours simultaneously from a palette of 16.7m, and a vector draw rate of more than 100,000 vectors per second, costs UKP65,000. The 200 and 300 series are all subdivided by the type of graphics processor used. The three graphics processor options are GS – graphics standard, GX – graphics extended, and GZ – graphics Z- buffer. GS is intended for applications that do not need any of the complex processing involved in shading. GX is for applications requiring surface and solids modelling. GZ performs surface and solid modelling at ten times the speed of the GX. An InterPro 220 can be field upgraded to a 240 by replacing the GS graphics processor with the GX. Similarly 340 models can be upgraded to a 360 through a GX-to-GZ swap and the addition of a floating point engine which is based on the 2264/65 Vector Floating Point processor from Weitek and a custom integer processor jointly developed by Intergraph and Wafer Scale Integration Inc.
Content from our partners
