The Mitsubishi Electric MELCOM ME RISC series was a series of high-performance workstations running Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX UNIX operating system on Hewlett-Packard’s precision architecture (PA) RISC processors. Mitsubishi Electric started selling the first models of the series in May 1991, supplied from Hewlett-Packard on an OEM basis. Mitsubishi Electric announced three workstation models (ME/R7200, ME/R7300, and ME/R7500) alongside three server models (ME/S7200, ME/S7300, and ME/S7500). Applications included CAD, CAM, and CAE, CASE, and precision multidimensional image processing.
Using PA-RISC processors, the ME/R7300 and ME/R7500 offered a performance level of 76 MIPS, among the highest for workstations at the time, and the diskless ME/R7200 offered 1 MIPS performance for under 40,000 yen. The ME/S7200, ME/S7300, and ME/S7500 servers featured plenty of processing power and ample disk space (expandable to 10 GB on the ME/S7200 and ME/S7300 and to 40 GB on the ME/S7500).
The MELCOM ME RISC series was capable of extremely fast rendering for applications, as the table below indicates, by combining a powerful CPU with graphic systems such as GRX, CRX, Personal VRX, and Turbo VRX.
| ME/R7200 ME/S7200 |
ME/R7300 ME/S7300 |
ME/R7500 ME/S7500 |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU (clock frequency) | PA-RISC (50MHz) | PA-RISC (66MHz) | PA-RISC (66MHz) |
| CPU performance | 57MIPS | 76MIPS | 76MIPS |
| 17MFLOPS (double-precision) |
22MFLOPS (double-precision) |
22MFLOPS (double-precision) |
|
| 55.5SPECmarks | 72.2SPECmarks | 72.2SPECmarks | |
| Cache (instruction/data) |
128KB/256KB | 128KB/256KB | 256KB/256KB |
| Main memory | 16 — 64MB | 16 — 64MB | 16 — 192MB |
| Graphics systems | GRX，CRX， PersonalVRX， TurboVRX |
GRX，CRX， PersonalVRX， TurboVRX |
CRX， PersonalVRX， TurboVRX |
| Internal disk | [ME/R7200] 210 MB — 840 MB, diskless option available [ME/S7200] 420 MB — 840 MB |
[ME/R7300] 210MB — 840MB [ME/S7300] 840MB |
[ME/R7500] 660MB — 2.6GB [ME/S7500] 660MB — 2.6GB |
| Max. disk capacity | 10GB | 10GB | 40GB |
| EISA slots | 1 (optional on the ME/R7200) | 1 | 4 |
| Dimensions [mm] (w x d x h) |
508×470×114 | 508×470×114 | 220×595×610 |
| GRX | CRX | PersonalVRX | TurboVRX(T2) | TurboVRX(T4) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CRT monitor | 19 inch | ||||
| Display colors | B & W, 256 gray levels | 256 | 256 | 16.7 million | |
| Display resolution | 1280×1024 | ||||
| Performance (peak value) | 1.15 million 2D/3D vectors/s 870,000 — 910,000 X Window vectors/s | 54,000 triangles/s 37,000 quadrilaterals/s | 671,000 anti-alias vectors/s 216,000 triangles/s 98,000 quadrilaterals/s | 882,000 anti-alias vectors/s 330,000 triangles/s 195,000 quadrilaterals/s | |
