San Jose-based Ramtec Corp – which emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the end of last year after a year of financial troubles – has released a new product that it hopes will significantly strengthen its future sales base. The Ramtec Millennium imaging subsystem has been designed to accelerate the processing and visual display of technical and scientific data on Unix workstations, turning them into image processing systems for jobs such as remote sensing, geophysical, medical and other image-oriented applications. Connected to the workstation via VME bus or SCSI link, the Millennium offloads image processing and visualisation from the host machine with support for floating point performance and large memory capacity demanded by such applications. Floating point calculations are rated at 80 MFLOPS and the system has 16Mb of local memory and 30-megabit-per-second local buses. Millennium uses the 10 MIPS TMS34020 graphics processor and the 40 MFLOPS TMS34082 floating point processor launched by Texas Instruments back in November 1988, and also has a 20-bit memory video board. Software includes the Imaging Kernel System software developed by the University of Lowell, Massachusetts, compliant with the ANSI Programmer’s Imaging Kernel, PIK, graphics standard, and the X Window System at accelerated performance levels. Beta testing in March, and set to be in production by April, Millennium costs $26,000 in a stand-alone, seven slot chassis with SCSI interface, or $21,000 for a three board set that plugs into a VME backplane – the prices are for single quantities.
