Siemens AG announced its new Celsius range of NT workstations yesterday, claiming them to be the fastest in the world. The German company will initially only make the new machines available in Europe. Alan Norman, marketing director, explained that Siemens did not have the support and sales infrastructure to get behind the machines in the US, although he admitted that some stray shipments may end up stateside. In the longer term, he said that Siemens would be looking to get a foothold in the workstation market in America through partnership or acquisition.
Siemens is targeting the Intel processor-based Celsius boxes at the CAD/CAM market. The entry-level Celsius 420 is a 500MHz Pentium III-based system equipped with up to 768Mb of RAM. Siemens says that the 420 is the fastest system in its class, boasting ratings of 21.3 SPECint95 and 15 SPECfp95. The high end system, the 630, achieved ratings higher than any other 550MHz dual Pentium III Xeon-based machine, with 24.4 SPECint95 and 17.1 SPECfp95. The range also includes the Celsius 620, a dual Pentium III machine. Siemens is reinforcing the graphics capabilities of the boxes with a customized graphics board from Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc. Dr Bernd Kosch, director of workstation marketing, said that the board was essentially a Fire GL board which had been tweaked so that it had an improved screen refresh rate and had undergone additional reliability tests. The workstations have also all been optimized for use with SuSE Linux.
Competition for the workstations will come from Hewlett-Packard Co’s Visualize NT line and SGI’s Visual range. Kosch said that he saw HP’s machines as the toughest technical competition. However, he dismissed the SGI range, the company’s first foray into the NT space. The offering that they have today…is not a CAD/CAM machine from my point of view, he said. Siemens is keen to tackle the CAD/CAM market initially as a point of entry into the UK market. Gary Clove, workstation business manager, said that Britain was the largest workstation market in Europe and that it was expected to double in size by the 2001. By concentrating on one sector of the workstation market, Siemens hopes to replicate the model that allowed it to become the largest vendor in Germany – pick one specific area of a large market, dominate that, then move into adjacent sectors, such as financial machines. Clove said that it was a good time to launch a range of CAD/CAM workstations as a lot of the large aviation and automobile concerns are migrating to NT. Siemens is working with CAD/CAM software developers Dassault, Unigraphics and PTC, and has recruited a number of UK CAD/CAM resellers. The workstations will be available from the beginning of June, costing between 1,500 pounds ($2,420) and 6,000 pounds ($9,682).
