Silicon Graphics Inc last week brought the base price of its 1.2 GFLOPS RealityEngine2 graphics subsystem down below $100,000 with the launch of the Reality Station. The new member of the Onyx family of graphics processing systems employs a single 200MHz MIPS R4400 RISC and is aimed at advanced design and manufacturing, image processing and visual simulation markets. The 1.2 GFLOPS RealityEngine2 has previously been available only in a $170,000 system. Out in March, Reality Station lists at $94,000 with 64Mb RAM, 2Gb disk and 21 screen. Onyx Symmetric Multiprocessing systems go from two to 24 R4400s – Power Onyx uses the R8000. Silicon Graphics has a new Audio/Serial option for Onyx and Challenge systems for high-quality audio processing. The board has six ports and costs from $5,000, in May.
