Committing to offer Microsoft Corp’s NT on Precision Architecture RISC by 1995, Samsung Electronics Co has launched its first workstation built around the RISC, which it makes under licence from Hewlett-Packard Co – six months later than originally planned. Samsung Electronics licensed the workstation CPU, system technologies and HP-UX operating system and developed the SWS715 workstation in co-operation with Hewlett-Packard. Samsung manufactures the workstations at a new plant in South Korea. From its US base in San Jose, the Samsung Workstation Division says the SWS715 is based on the 50MHz PA-7100 superscalar processor which includes on-chip floating-point co-processor and delivers 69 SPECmarks (89) and has true integer performance of 36 SPECint (92) and floating-point performance of 72 SPECfp (92). There is also a 33MHz version. Fully compatible with the HP 9000 Series 700s, it runs the SS-UX operating system, which adds input-output features to HP-UX. It is claimed to draw 920,000 two- or three-dimensional vectors per second, and comes with one EISA slot, and rather than tread on its partner’s toes, Samsung hopes to build complementary markets in imaging and scientific visualisation, going entirely through indirect channels. Samsung is recruiting non-Hewlett-Packard partners, offering unbundled configurations to enable resellers to configure their own systems by adding third-party peripherals. Prices start at $4,000 for a 33MHz entry-level configuration with 8Mb memory and no disk or monitor. A standard configuration of the 50MHz model with 19 colour monitor, 16Mb RAM and a 525Mb disk is $14,000. On the chip side, Samsung says it is developing and will fabricate its own Precision Architecture RISC microprocessor that will combine high speed memory technology with the CPU logic on one chip.
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