Mini-super newly-wed Stardent Computer Inc, nee Stellar, nee Ardent, has produced its first offspring this week – the Stardent 3000 graphics sup-ercomputer. It comes with one to four 32MHz MIPS Computer Systems R3000 processors, and is rated at 128 MIPS, 192 MFLOPS fully configured. It comes with up to four 128Mb memory boards and is claimed to offer vector and threedimensional quadrilateral-drawing speeds of up to 300,000 and 150,000 per second respectively. It supports Dore, Ardent’s ob-ject or-iented graphics library, but not yet Stellar’s Application Vi-sualisation System, which will be up in the first quarter of next year. Shipping in volume next month, the entry level 3000, with one 32Mb processor, a 380Mb disk drive, graphics, two SCSI channels, Network File System, a VMEbus interface, Ethernet and Unix V.3 is UKP72,300 – the server version without graphics is UKP56,000. A four processor model with 64Mb and 760Mb disk is UKP151,100. The 3000 comes from the Ard-ent side of the relationship – Ardent used the MIPS part in its Titan series – and is compatible with the Stardent 1500 system, for merly the Titan II. Upgrades to the 3000 are UKP20,300 each, and it claims 100 orders already. The 128Mb memory boards cost UKP97,500.
