DIGITAL Equipment's new line of 64-bit Alpha workstations announced last November has hardly set the region's markets alight. While the company cites ''enormous interest'' in its AXP systems in Asia, it cannot yet point to a single sale. Digital officials said, simply, that its AXP sales in Asia had been ''in the hundreds of units'' - but that it had yet to get permission from any customers to publicise its successes. On the other hand, it is probably premature to start counting units on AXP. It is an entirely new generation of computer and, at five months old, is very much in its infancy. And, until now, the company has lacked a low-end, entry-level machine able to compete for volume sales in the workstation wars with arch rivals such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Today, Digital takes the wraps off two new low-end models. The company claims its DEC 3000 Model 300L is the fastest desktop system available for under US$5,000. And it claims its Model 300 is the fastest workstation available for less than $10,000. ''We are expanding the range to meet the low-end, entry-level demand - the high volume products,'' said DEC's Asia region AXP workstation product manager Mr Jeevan Kumaran. A series of high-end graphics cards and new architecture known as ''workstation farms'', which will allow any number of AXP systems to work together in parallel on the same application, are also being launched worldwide today. The company has also launched a new high-end flagship workstation system - the model 500X. It is a system which, the company claims, is the fastest single processor machine on the market (it is based on the 200MHz version of DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor). The most significant of the announcements, though, must be the high-volume, low-end workstation products. Digital has been campaigning hard with third-party software developers to get them to port products to the Alpha platform (which runs the OSF/1, Open/VMS and WindowsNT operating systems). The addition of a volume product should give those developers additional incentive to get more applications to Alpha. Mr Kumaran said about 550 applications were now shipping for Alpha, although more than 1,000 were at a demonstration stage, and more than 2,300 had committed to porting to Alpha. ''We have really come a long way since (the launch) last November,'' Mr Kumaran said. ''With this announcement, we have a very good spread of products across a performance range,'' he said. ''We also have aggressive plans to continue to build faster, cheaper machines.'' From a technological point of view, the most interesting of Digital's announcements deals with its so-called ''workstation farms'', whereby systems can work simultaneously on the same application. Workstation farms appear to be a logical extension of the DEC experience in ''clusters''. The company has had enormous success in the past decade in selling ''VAX clusters'', where groups of its VAX series could be tied together to work on a single application. According to Mr Kumaran, the AXP systems in a workstation farm are tied together by high-speed fibre-optic links. The architecture is aimed at users wanting to ''down-size'' from super-computers or large mainframe systems - or even ''up-size'' smoothly from a single workstation to a more powerful system. The company's new high-end workstation product, the Model 500, will start shipping next month. Digital claims that the product (code-named ''Hotpink'') outperforms both Hewlett-Packard's HP9000/755 and the IBM RS/6000/580 workstations as the most powerful single-processor system on the market.
