Hewlett-Packard Co yesterday duly set the workstation world on its ear with launch of its HP 9000 Models 720, 730 and 750, with the lowest one rated at 57 MIPS, 55.5 Specmarks, the higher two – with a 66MHz clock against 50MHz on the baby, both rated at 76 MIPS, about 72 Specmarks. All have 256Kb data cache, the 720 and 730 have 128Kb instruction cache, the 750, 256Kb. Memory on the lower two is 16Mb to 64Mb, the 750 goes to 192Mb. There are also server versions of all three, and three graphics options with GRX greyscale standard, CRX colour, Personal VRX for advanced three-dimensional modelling with solids and ray-tracing, and a faster Turbo VRX version. The chip adds features from the Apollo Computer Inc Prism development to the Precision Architecture RISC, notably additional instructions, and there is a tightly coupled floating point processor with integrated arithmetic logic unit and multiplier, optimised for vector and matrix operations. The speed is helped by a bus that transfers data from cache to CPU at 264Mbytes-per-second. The 720GRX is UKP8,500 – $11,900 – with 16Mb; there are also server versions of all three at UKP10,000 to UKP12,000; UKP15,000 to UKP18,000; and UKP29,000 and the company is introducing unified pricing across Europe, including the East – up to now, the local subsidiaries have been charging whatever the market will bear.
