News is written and compiled by Jenny DonelanCorel Corp. (Ottawa, Canada) has launched a new line of software applications called procreate. Painter 7, previously acquired from
MetaCreations, is the first product in the new line. Corel has also purchased technical illustration software developer
Micrografx (Dallas, TX)....
Sun Micro Systems (Palo Alto, CA) and
Side Effects Software have announced the beta release of Side Effects' Houdini animation package for Sun's Solaris operating system....Workstation vendors
Hewlett-Packard (Palo Alto, CA) and
Compaq (Houston, TX) have agreed to merge....
Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp. (Salt Lake City, UT) has announced that it will sell its
REALimage business unit, which makes semiconductor chips for advanced graphics and video applications, to the Japanese firm of Real Vision. The sale has a maximum value of $12 million. E&S has also announced a staff reduction of approximately 10 percent of its 840 employees....
Autodesk (San Rafael, CA) has announced that it will acquire the software product line of digital media provider
Media 100 (Los Gatos, CA) for approximately $16 million.
Dell and Compaq workstations equipped with Nvidia Quadro2 Pro graphics cards recently achieved the best price/performance scores for the Pro/Designer ProCDRS-03 subset of the SPECviewperf 6.1.2 benchmark. The ProCDRS benchmark is based on PTC's CDRS industrial design software and consists of 10 tests, each of which represents a different mode of operation within CDRS.
The mean scores represent the combined, weighted results of the 10 tests, measured in the number of frames per second the machines were able to execute. The larger the numbers, the better the performance. The $ per composite figure represents the system price divided by the mean score.
To see how the same workstations fared in other benchmark tests, or to review results from additional systems, visit www.spec.org/gpc.