In yet more evidence that IBM Corp can no longer lead but is doomed to follow these days, the Wall Street Journal reports that it has belatedly formed a unit to build engineering workstations that will run Windows NT on the Pentium Pro processors IBM gave up its license to fabricate. Intergraph Corp pioneered Windows NT workstations for engineering, but a string of companies led by Hewlett-Packard Co and Compaq Computer Corp are headed off down the same path. The new machines aren’t due out until next March, and the paper puts the decision down in part to the fact that IBM’s proprietary RS/6000 Unix workstation line has been under pressure as it moves to a new generation of machines. The move also makes it clear that IBM has all but thrown in the towel on low-end workstations using the PowerPC and running either NT or Unix. The new effort will apparently be run from within the Personal Computer Co but will draw expertise from the RS/6000 division and use RS/6000 sales channels. The new machines are expected to be in the $4,000 to $10,000 range but it’s much too early to put a firm price on them. Infoworld has also heard about them, talking of five models and saying they will use Matrox Graphics Inc Millenium boards rather than IBM’s own Mwave; IBM has reportedly gone to Intergraph Corp for an OpenGL graphics board at the high end.
