Having given up on its over-ambitious ES-1 supercomputer project, Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp has returned to its last project and extended its core computer graphics effort with a move into the three-dimensional Unix graphics workstation market, putting itself into competition with the likes of Silicon Graphics, Intergraph Corp, Stardent Computer and Hewlett-Packard Co. The Salt Lake City, Utah-based company’s entry is ESV, a series of five workstations built around 25MHz versions of MIPS Computer Systems’ R3000 RISC processor and binary-compatible with MIPS’ own systems. They are claimed to represent the first industry implementation of the extended, three-dimensional version of the PHIGS graphics standard – PEX which runs under X Window. Each uses AT&T signal processors to support the hard-wired version of PEX, and to achieve parallelism. And not all that ES-1 development has been wasted, as the things use a proprietary pixel chip designed using the same technology. The three chips are integrated via a 32Mb G-bus on a single board, and were chosen in this configuration because the R3000 is not powerful enough to carry out parallelism along with all the Z-buffering and depth-queuing required for graphics processing. The low-end ESV5 performs at 277,000 depth-queued vectors per second and 19,000 polygons per second, which rises to one million vectors and 100,000 polygons per second on the top-of-the-range ESV50. The 10,240 by 8,192 resolution is achieved using Cleanline technology, which implemented in four VLSI chips to display clear lines in wire-frame models, is the successor to Evans & Sutherland’s existing Shadowfax anti-aliasing raster technique. At present there are around 50 software houses developing applications for the PEX standard, and the workstations use an ES/PEX PS 390 software emulator to run the 35 or so applications written for the company’s 390 graphics terminals. Supporting the MIPS RISC processor’s application binary interface also means the new workstations will run software designed for MIPS Computer Systems machines. Rated at 20 MIPS and 8 MFLOPS, the workstations come with from 8Mb to 128Mb memory and up to 2.4Gb of disk. Running AT&T Unix with BSD extensions and the OSF/Motif graphical user interface they support TCP/IP, NFS, FDDI and ES/Dnet, an implementation of DECnet from KI Research, Belmont, California. Ethernet, and three RS232 ports come fitted, as does a SCSI controller for up to four devices, a VME bus with five slots and a 19 colour display. Increased graphics performance can be achieved with addition of extra signal processors, and the company expects to double the performance of the workstations in the future by cranking up the pixel chip specification and employing its CDRS high-speed, photo-realistic rendering system. Available next month, they cost from $49,000 for the ESV5 up to $85,000 for the ESV50. A server version is also in the works.
