THE 64-BIT workstation market has been kind of quiet in the past two years. Why? Well, on one side, Pentium/Xeon 32-bit systems took over the bulk of mainstream 3-D workstation market, and on the other side, some of the key 64-bit workstation platforms that could be called performers (that excludes Sun, of course) were on decline - Alpha, SGI, PA-RISC, pick your choice.
That's kinda disappointing, knowing that there are many users in need of combined computation and visualisation with fast 3-D graphics AND lotsa fast, big memory to handle the tasks ranging from 3-D and prepress to molecular modelling and quantum chemistry. Of course, they need a proper OS (that means UNIX or Linux) to run all that stuff reliably.
Except for HP's zx2000 and zx6000 offerings, based on McKinley and now Madison, there are no Itanium2 3-D workstations in the market, and IBM has finally come out with a decent (i.e. both CPU and 3-D are decently fast) POWER4+ 3-D station, the IntelliStation 275.
News source: The Inquirer
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