Signs in the US are that struggling Tektronix Inc, Wilsonville, Oregon, which is having to discontinue a lot of its lines and sharpen its focus to restore its flagging fortunes, is is slowly but surely moving away from its low-end two-dimensional complex instruction set workstations – which are facing stiff competition from the low-cost offerings from Sun Microsystems, DEC and Hewlett-Packard – in favour of the higher-end three-dimensional market. Certainly the introduction of its most powerful workstation yet – the XD88/35 – has done nothing to dispel rumours of this drift. Built around a 25MHz version of the Motorola 88000 RISC chip, the XD88/35 is rated by the company at 21 MIPS and 2.5 MFLOPS, and starts at $32,000. With eight-bit planes and a 16 colour monitor, it comes with Core TekImaging, a 4G graphics accelerator, and supports Tektronix’s Digital Video Interface. Tektronix has also signed up for IXI Ltd’s X.desktop software on all of its 88000-based systems, following a worldwide agreement signed between the two last week.
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