Hewlett-Packard Co’s new Windows NT workstations due today – see other story this section – are expected to use one or two 266MHz and 300MHz Pentium II chips with the Intel’s 440LX AGP Accelerated Graphics Port technology chipset, a motherboard connection designed to provide graphics accelerators in Pentium II-based systems with a high-speed interface to main memory, avoiding the current PCI bus bottleneck (CI No 3,130). HP’s new Visualize fx graphics accelerator boards will utilize AGP on the NT workstations and PCI bus I/O in new HP-UX workstations HP has also introduced to host them. The NT devices will compete with IBM’s Intellistation and other NT-based graphical workstation products from Compaq Computer, Intergraph and others. Visualize fx employs parallelizing techniques to process multiple graphics instructions at the same time, similar to those used in the company’s high-end PxFl graphics engine. Initially not all of the Visualize fx2, fx4 and fx6 accelerators – which incorporate two, four and six PA-8000 RISC floating point units respectively – will be supported on the NT boxes, although all are available for use with HP’s HP-UX 10.20-based workstations including new B-, C- and K-Class models introduced this week with higher performing PA-RISC CPUs than previous designs. The PA-7300LC-based C-Class entry-level workstation gets a new 180MHz CPU; the C-Class is now available with 200MHz and 240MHz PA-8200s, and the K-Class now accommodates up to six PA-8200s. HP’s also integrated 100BaseT Ethernet and Ultra SCSI on-board. With fx2, HP says a $16,500 B180L workstation performs 437 PLBsurf. HP-UX 11.0 ships in eight weeks on the boxes. Now that HP has handed its Unix workstation business over to the PC group, HP’s workstation executives say they will begin leveraging the PC business’ reseller and other distribution channels and says the unit’s build-to-order sales model will also be available to it. HP says it might pass on using floating point units from the first cut of the IA-64 Tahoe architecture – Intel Corp’s Merced – for a future generation Visualize boards. A C200 workstation with Visualize fx4 costs from $29,500, a C240 with Visualize fx6 costs from $60,500. The K370 with one 200MHz PA-8200 starts at $66,500 – additional CPUs are $25,000. The K570 with one 200MHz PA-8200 costs $86,500. Additional CPUs are $25,000.
