Silicon Graphics Inc is preparing a follow-on to its single largest revenue product, the Indigo2 Impact high-end three- dimensional desktop, for early next year, Unigram.X hears from US sources. The Impact line was left untouched when Silicon Graphics updated and renamed its Indy workstations as the O2 range, and its Challenge servers as the Origin line last October (CI No 3,024). The new systems are likely to come in one and two-way configurations using 175MHz and 195MHz R10000 RISC chips, and presumably the same ccNUMA-based S2MP Scalable Shared Memory Multiprocessor technology used in the Origin servers. Observers expect the new systems to perform around 10% better on integers and 70% on floating point calculations than those they replace, running the new Cellular Irix implementation of Unix (CI No 3,020). The workstation line is likely to be priced from $25,000, with some half a dozen configurations. Silicon Graphics chief executive Ed McCracken once predicted the Indigo2 Impact line would be a $1,000m business by mid-1996, and the company says it’s not too far off that mark now.
