Digital creates next NT family of workstations

Digital Equipment, which sealed an alliance with Microsoft last year, has rounded out its family of desktop workstations with the addition of Windows NT Personal Workstations (PWs) based on Intel Pentium chip sets that can be fully upgraded to Digital's powerful 64-bit Alpha processor.

The PWs are available with Pentium Pro 180 and single or double 200-MHz processors, supported by 32 MB to 256 MB of EDO memory and five PCI slots. They come with Windows NT version 3.51 of 4.0 factory installed.

'Windows NT is a major trend in the industry so we saw the need to create a new NT group within the Digital Workstation family,' said Annie Chan, Digital's workstation manager for Asia Pacific.

The PWs have been designed for customers in the graphic-intensive industries, including electrical and manufacturing CAD/CAM, animation, finance, geographic information systems and software engineering.

Most workstations supplied by Digital were networked but on graphics applications they were operated individually to maximise processing power, Ms Chan said.

A typical end-user order could be as low as one or two machines, with value-added re-sellers or systems integrators ordering a range of between 20 and 50 and distributors ordering as many as 100 machines at a time.

The new PWs offer a big range of 3D graphics including Digital's PowerStorm OpenGL adapters, integrated 16-bit audio and integrated Ethernet. They can handle workstation applications from leading vendors including Softimage, AutoDesk, Bentley and ViewLogic.