Apollo Computer Inc’s most powerful three-dimensional graphics workstation yet, the DN590 Turbo introduced this week (CI No 680), is the Chelmsford, Massachusetts company’s answer to the likes of the new Prime and Silicon Graphics three-dimensional workstations. It is designed for 3D solids modelling and other compute-intensive applications requiring three-dimensional shaded graphics. It combines the MC68020 CPU and 68881 floating point unit with a new graphics accelerator, and the result is claimed to display 16.7m colours simultaneously, provide 24 colour planes and perform 130,000 3D floating point transform and clipping operations per second. It is aimed at graphics-intensive applications such as image processing, product styling, visual simulation, computer animation, mechanical computer-aided engineering, molecular modelling, fluid dynamics, high-energy physics and robotics applications. The announcement also included a new line of high-performance network servers, and Apollo also took the opportunity to add enhanced versions of its DN580 Turbo and DN570 Turbo at lower prices. Apollo’s new DSP500 family of network servers are designed to off-load a wide variety of compute-intensive tasks, such as large compilations, simulation programs or other remote-processing operations and to act as communications or peripheral equipment servers. The new versions of the DN580 Turbo and DN570 Turbo workstations have new ESDI disk technology and advanced graphics software. The DN590 Turbo is offered as a packaged systems specially configured with advanced graphics software and expanded memory. The existing DN580 Turbo is also now offered in two packaged versions, one for three-dimensional wireframe modelling and another for high-performance electronic design and two-dimensional mechanical design. And the existing DN570 Turbo now comes in a packaged system configured for artificial intelligence and electronic design applications. The new DSP500 servers can be configured for extensive file storage or demanding distributed computing across large networks. Prices for the DN590 start at $57,900. The DSP500s have an entry-level price of $29,900 and the starting price for the enhanced DN580 Turbo workstation has been reduced by $4,000 to $49,900. Apollo claims that the new DN570 Turbo and DN580 Turbo packaged systems price reductions result in customer savings of up to 10%.
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