Silicon Graphics Inc announced a change in business model alongside its much anticipated new NT workstations, launched in San Jose yesterday. SGI CEO Rick Belluzio said the new machines, designed along similar lines to Apple Computer Inc’s recently launched PowerMac servers, follow a year of changes since he joined the company from the number two slot at Hewlett-Packard Co one year ago. Belluzio promised more changes in the near future aimed at turning around the company. There’s more to it than this, he said. The Silicon Graphics 320 visual workstations, which ship next month, and the high-end 540 systems, promised for the Spring, will be offered to resellers and sold direct over the internet, as well as going through SGI’s traditional direct sales force and master resellers. SGI claims it will authorize 600 resellers to offer the systems this year worldwide, and is aiming to eventually appoint around 2,000 resellers. To help it with the more challenging economics of the NT volume market, SGI has decided to outsource its manufacturing to Huntsville, Alabama-based SCI Systems, Inc, a contract manufacturer also known as Space Contractors Inc, which will build the machines to order. SGI will keep its previous master and specialist resellers, notably Access Graphics Inc, EdgeMark Systems Inc for government sales, global reseller Rand Systems, and recently appointed national reseller Entex Information Services Inc. SGI’s director of product marketing, Cliff Apsey, said that SGI was anticipating some 70% of its NT sales would be channeled through VARs.
Visual Computing Architecture
The new hardware was so well previewed that there were little other surprises at the launch. SGI is aiming the new systems somewhere between the Compaq Computer Corp and Dell Computer Corp workstations which are really PCs with high powered, but commodity add-on graphics cards, and workstation and graphics expert companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co and Intergraph Corp, which have grafted their own high-performance graphics onto the standard PC architecture. As expected, SGI made a feature out of their moves away from the standard PC, most notably in the integrated graphics of its Visual Computing Architecture which, inspired by SGI’s O2 Unix workstations, provide a high-speed path between processor, memory, graphics and peripherals. SGI’s Cobalt graphics chipset, described as a new generation of graphics chips derived from its Unix machines, are also incorporated on the motherboard. That makes the system most capable of running streaming video, with the 540, quad processor models capable of handling up to four streams of uncompressed NTSC or PAL video in real-time. The machines are also capable of good 3D and – unusually for SGI – 2D performance, the company says. The graphics to memory interconnect can achieve 3.2GB/sec, and the I/O interconnect runs at 1.6Gb/sec, resulting in bandwidth of more than six times standard AGP 2X and more than 12 times the PCI bus. SGI has also provided benchmarks claiming to show that its 320 workstation runs at 2.5 times the performance of an HP Kayack FX4 workstation, but costs two-thirds of the price. The systems should open up new markets for SGI, particularly publishing through users of Adobe Systems Inc and Quark Inc software previously unavailable to SGI users. Video editing is also a major focus. Fending off criticism that is has altered the PC architecture to such an extent that its systems are no longer standard, Cliff Apsey said that SGI’s version of NT was 100% compatible at the application level, and that only the drivers were proprietary. They are likely to be included on the CD of the (eventually) forthcoming Windows 2000, which the systems have been designed for. SGI gave the base price of the 320 as $3,395, but the addition of a monitor takes that up to around $4,590. The 540 has a base price of $5,995, or $6,590 with monitor. SGI also launched the 1600SW 17.3 inch flat panel monitor, developed in conjunction with Number Nine Visual Technology, throwing in its proprietary ColorLock color calibration hardware and software, not available on the PC and Mac versions of the screen. It costs $2495.
