"IBM's Fire GL1 graphics accelerator provides excellent 3D graphics performance at a very attractive price. The performance is comparable to existing mid-range solutions, but at half the price," said Tom Copeland, vice president, workstations and high performance systems, IDC. "The GL1 leverages IBM's long history of excellence in 3D graphics. It should be a real winner."

According to a recent IDC report, the branded NT workstation market grew 98% last year, making it the fastest growing segment of the PC market. As one of the leaders in this market, IBM IntelliStations are being used by customers for such activities as web-authoring, mechanical computer-aided design, video-editing, high-end business applications and financial services.

The new IBM IntelliStation Z Pro offers advanced standards-based technologies and manageability tools, as well as an extensive portfolio of supported applications, such as Allegro/Cadence, CATIA/CADAM, I-DEAS, KOBRA/Reuters, Master Series, Maya/Alias Wavefront, and Pro/ENGINEER.

"The IBM IntelliStation Z Pro is the high-performance flagship of our Windows NT workstation lineup and no matter what benchmark, it's delivering unprecedented price/performance," said Dr. Satish Gupta, vice president, IBM professional workstations. "We're setting a new standard for high-performance NT workstations, by incorporating IBM technologies in the Z Pro that no competitor can match."

IBM IntelliStation Z Pro Technology
The IBM IntelIStation Z Pro incorporates industry-leading technologies in a mini-tower form factor, with an IBM-engineered system and BIOS. The graphics drivers have been optimized for new Pentium III Xeon floating point instructions and memory streaming, which will help customers take advantage of the new microprocessor's power. The IBM IntelliStation Z Pro features:

• 100MHz front side bus and full speed L2 cache
• up to 2GB (3) of 100MHz ECC SDRAM
• dual ported Ultra 2 SCSI with bus mastering capability
• Ultra 2 SCSI drives at 7,200 or 10,000 rpm
• seven full-length slots: one AGP, five PCI and one ISA/PCI shared slot
• seven expansion bays, (four open) with 91GB of HDD capacity

Enhanced Graphics
For high-performance 3D customers, the combination of IBM IntelliStation Z Pro and Intense3D Wildcat 4000 graphics is providing a jolt to current benchmark scores. The Z Pro delivered a Pro CDRS-01 score of over 25 (4), the highest OpenGL score ever published (5). In comparative tests, the IBM IntelliStation Z Pro graphics solution was over three times faster than Compaq (6), 68% faster than Dell and 16% faster than Hewlett Packard. The Intense3D Wildcat 4000 graphics adapter includes:

• accelerated graphics port (AGP) 2X with sidebanding-based geometry engine
• separate 200MHz 3D rasterization engine
• 16MB of frame memory
• 128-bit graphics engine
• full OpenGL 3D engine with ICD
• 64MB of texture memory

"IBM's newest IntelliStation featuring the Intense3D Wildcat graphics and the Pentium III Xeon processor is another example of IBM's commitment to deliver cost-effective, performance-driven solutions to the CAD/CAM/CAE market," said Bill Carelli, vice president of marketing, Structural Dynamics Research Corporation. "Coupled with I-DEAS, this solution will provide users with the performance and functionality they need to address the most complex design, simulation and data management tasks, and we continue to be very impressed with the Windows NT workstations being delivered by IBM."

The IBM IntelliStation Z Pro is also available with IBM's newly-developed Fire GL1 graphics technology, the first-ever, fully-integrated, 256-bit OpenGL 3D, AGP solution, optimized on the IntelliStation Z Pro for advanced 3D. In a recent benchmark test, the new IBM IntelliStation Z Pro with Fire GL1 graphics outperformed comparable 3D solutions from Compaq by 97% (7), Hewlett Packard by 81% and Dell by 24%.

IBM Manageability Tools
Many customers today recognize the critical role that systems manageability plays in determining their total cost of ownership. Recognizing that the purchase price is but a fraction of their overall costs, customers are looking for ways to reduce the costs of deployment, inventory-tracking, security and administration. In the ntelliStation Z Pro, IBM-developed management technology is at the forefront with IBM's Universal Manageability tools including:

• Universal Management Agent*
• IBM Wake on LAN* (6), and Alert on LAN* (7)
• System Migration Assistant
• LANClient Control Manager*
• SMART Reaction*
• Asset ID* (8)

Pricing
Estimated reseller prices for the new IBM IntelliStation Z Pro, Pentium III Xeon, 500MHz, start at $4,050 (9).

(2) Fire GL1 is a trademark of Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc., and is used under license.

(3) GB means billions of bytes when referring to hard drive capacity. Accessible capacity may vary.

(4) IBM IntelliStation Z Pro, dual 500MHz with Intense3D

(5) Open GL website is www.specbench.org

(6) Independent test results as of January, 1999. Visit www.specbench.org for complete price/performance results (the lower numbers reflect the higher or better score). Measured against Viewperf 6.1: ProCDRS-01. Configurations: IBM IntelliStation Z Pro, dual 500MHz with Intense3D Wildcat 4000; Compaq SP700, 450MHz with Powerstorm 300; Dell Precision 610, 450MHz with Intense3D 3400GA, and Hewlett Packard Kayak XW, 450MHz with fx6.

(7) Independent test results as of January, 1999. Visit www.specbench.org for complete price/performance results (the lower numbers reflect the higher or better score). Measured against Viewperf 6.1: AWadvs-02. Configurations: IBM IntelliStation Z Pro, dual 500MHz with Fire GL1; Compaq SP 700, 450MHz with Powerstorm 300; Dell Precision 610, 450MHz with Oxygen GMX2000 and, Hewlett Packard Kayak XW, 450MHz with fx6.

(8) Requires purchase of IBM Wake on LAN-enabled network interface card sold separately.

(9) Alert on LAN and wake on LAN are solutions developed by the IBM/Intel Advanced Manageability Alliance that help you manage and protect networked computers.

(10) Asset ID allows your computer to be "scanned" by various radio frequency emitting devices which must be purchased separately from independent companies.