Wilsonville, Oregon-based Tektronix Inc Network Display Division has merged its technical XP330 X Terminals and XP11 commercial machines into one family, TekXpress, and launched a 40MHz MIPS Technologies Inc R3000-based X Terminal – the XP338P. The division also announced the release of version 6.0 upgrades for its X Terminal range. Tektronix’s disappointing first quarter results, which saw net profits down 1.5% at $9.5m – and that after $3.3m in exceptional gains, pushed the division to combine the two X Terminal lines in order to cut costs. It also aims to eliminate potential product overlap. As a result, the Network Display Division hopes to improve market share and become more responsive to an increasingly competitive market. The division is, nonetheless, one of Tektronix’s most profitable businesses, and contributes 23% – $250m – to group revenues. The X Terminal market is now worth $400m, according to X Terminal watchdog the X Buiness Group. Tek’s Network Display Division takes 15% of the market, behind Hewlett-Packard Co and Digital Equipment Corp with 17% apiece, but ahead of IBM Corp with 14%. Network Computing Devices Inc is of course the market leader, though it is now down to 25%. The TekXpress line now comprises 11 monochrome and colour Mips Technologies Inc R3000-based XP330s and Texas Instruments Inc 34020-based XP11s. The new XP338P has a claimed performance rating of 105,000 Xstones – Xstones is a graphics benchmark – and clocks 100,000 vectors, 10,000 flat-shared triangles and 5,000 Gouraud-shared triangles per second.

Dual processor architecture

It runs two- and three-dimensional graphics simultaneously in multiple X Windows, as well as distributing three-dimensional graphics over a network. The 19 colour XP338P machine has a dual processor architecture: the R3000 to manage networking, three-dimensional rendering and X Window functions; Texas’s 40MHz 342020 processor supports accelerated graphics, double buffering and Z-buffering. It comes with from 8Mb to 32Mb of memory and two single in-line memory module slots for memory expansion. XP338P supports a variety of host machines including Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparcstations, DEC’s Ultrix Unix boxes and VAXes – support for DEC Alpha OSF/1-based AXP systems will be added next year – and IBM’s RS/6000. The XP338P X Terminal is available now and costs UKP6,155. The Network Display Division also released version 6.0 software upgrades, adding two software optimisation kits for Sun Microsystems Sparcstations and DEC Ultrix and VAX machines. The Sun kit comes with a full implementation of Sun’s Open Look window manager, support for native Sun scalable fonts and Network File System boot capabilities. This software is also coupled with Tektronix’s Sun-compatible 1,152 by 900 resolution display and a Sun Unix keyboard. The DEC software supports Open Software Foundation Motif, DECnet and LAT protocols, native DEC fonts, DEC VT220 X Terminal emulation and VT220 keyboard. In addition, version 6.0 comes with document imaging capabilities, Simple Network Management Protocol for system administrators, and a serial compressed X protocol for remote site access. Version 6.0 upgrades are out now. The Sun kit is UKP65, the DEC software UKP215.