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HUNTSVILLE, ALA. - A battle of digital multimedia technologies worthy of a Star Wars sequel is quietly gearing up as Intergraph Corp. seeks to unseat market leader Silicon Graphics Inc. and gain control of a rapidly emerging category of professional computer-the "video workstation, " which is used to create content for Hollywood films and for television.
"Digital content creation-specifically, animation and compositing-is going to drive the computing industry for the next few years, because that's where the glamour is and that's where the money is," said Jim Meadlock, chief executive officer of Intergraph, based here.
The battle pits the latest twists on the Windows NT workstation against battle-hardened Unix stalwarts equipped with proprietary RISC processors. For the contenders, the biggest engineering challenge isn't in the processor or operating system. Rather, it lies in upping system- and peripheral-bus throughputs to bust across the "bandwidth bottleneck" that's hampered the ability of conventional workstations to handle multiple streams of live video in real-time.
Intergraph this month will unleash its bid to drive those technologies forward by introducing a Windows NT workstation specially engineered to run a new Windows NT port of the digitalstudio software suite from animation specialists SoftImage Inc. (Montreal). In addition, Intergraph has embarked on a joint development deal with Sony Corp. to create platforms tuned for the professional digital-video market; the first fruits will be unveiled next month.
In designing its new NT workstation, Intergraph engineers worked closely with software developers at SoftImage, which is owned by Microsoft Corp., to ensure that the system would be able to support several 21Mbyte/second video streams.
"Getting the bandwidth up on the PC architecture so that video can flow through smoothly wasn't easy. It's a case where you can't just take a standard PC and integrate in a bunch of offthe-shelf components-they're just not out there," said Wade Patterson, president of Intergraph Computer Systems. "We're talking about handling multiple streams of live video in real-time, and the ability to do compositing and animation all in one seat."
Silicon Graphics, for its part, isn't taking Intergraph's challenge lying down. "They have specifically targeted us in entertainment-that much is clear," said Greg Estes, director...