With Windows NT and a crop of other Unix vendors breathing down its neck, Silicon Graphics Inc’s trying to wring as much performance out of its systems as it can and is currently tweaking OpenGL graphics libraries to run faster on each of its hardware platforms. First for a makeover is its low-end Mips R5000- and R10000 RISC-based O2 workstations, which run Irix 6.3 Unixb and are claimed to perform graphics tasks up to 30% faster. SGI says it’s now caught up with the order backlog for O2s which had been negatively impacted its bottom line in the first two quarters of shipment. SGI will tweak R500 and R10000 – now at 180MHz and 175MHz respectively – to keep performance up through mid-1998 when the next-generation R12000 RISC is due. SGI’s still tuning OpenGL for Octance workstations and Origin and Onyx servers. The company will add Data General Corp’s new Fibre Channel RAID systems to its product line next quarter and will sell an XIO Fibre Channel card based upon Adaptec Inc technology to attach the storage subsystems to SGI systems. FibreVault is a non-RAID Fibre Channel storage configuration already available for use with SGI systems.
