Digital Equipment Corp has cranked its 21164 Alpha RISC to 500MHz and is using the part in a new AlphaStation 500/500 workstation. DEC claims that at 15 SPECint95 and 19.5 SPECfp95 it’s the highest performing desktop machine. It should be, those numbers are achieved with an 8Mb cache. It doesn’t quite edge Hewlett-Packard Co’s K460EG deskside workstation which uses a 180MHz 64-bit PA-8000 RISC and is rated at 20.2 SPECfp95 and 11.8 SPECint95, though neither are available until September in any case. However, DEC’s latest hot box certainly pipped HP’s high-end C180-XP desktop, rated at 11.8 SPECint95 and 18.7 SPECfp95. DEC is offering its new PowerStorm 2D and 3D graphics cards for the 500/500, which runs Digital Unix, Windows NT and OpenVMS. It supports up to 512Mb RAM, five slots and four PCI bays, one of them 64-bit. DEC’s aiming the thing at mechanical CAD, entertainment, GIS and scientific markets. 500/266 /333 and /400 models are upgradable with a board swap. An NT version with 2Mb cache, 4Mb texture memory, 128Mb RAM, 2Gb disk and 21′ screen costs $54,660 from September. The 8Mb cache option is available in the fourth quarter. No prices are available for other configurations.
