Huntsville, Alabama-based Intergraph Corp yesterday announced its next-generation computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering workstations and servers using its new C400 version of the Clipper RISC. The family includes the Series 2400 desktop and Series 6400 deskside workstations and servers, which join the InterServe 6605 server and the InterPro 6450 and 6480 workstations already announced (CI No 1,811), and ship in March. Both series deliver an overall CPU performance level of 33 SPECmarks, 10 double precision Linpak Megaflops and 36 Dhrystone MIPS – three to six times faster than systems using the C300 Clipper, with floating-point-intensive applications showing the most improvement.Although the new machines are binary-compatible with their predecessors, it is best to recompile to optimise for the new features of the C400 – the C400 chip implements both superscalar dispatch and superpipelined operation to optimise concurrency at all stages of program execution.The minimum workstation configuration includes 16Mb main memory, 426Mb 3.5 disk and 19 256-colour monitor. High-end workstation configurations can include 256Mb main memory, up to 5Gb of disk and dual 27 monitors simultaneously displaying 16.7m colours. When configured with the VITec-VI-50 Image Computer, the ImageStation 6487 for high-end image processing applications creates the company’s highest performance graphics subsystem. Workstation prices range from $18,500 at the low end to over $100,000 for high-end configurations. Server configurations omit graphics adaptors and displays and prices go from $13,900 to $100,000.
