As expected (CI No 1,846), Silicon Graphics Inc has rolled out its Crimson series of mid-range imaging and graphical workstations and servers in the Iris range, using the second iteration of MIPS Computer Systems Inc’s 64-bit R4000 RISC. The all-colour, three-dimensional machines are rated at 70 SPECmarks performance, and come in above the low-end, multi-media Indigo boxes launched in July last year. They use MIPS’ 50MHz R4000SC secondary cache – CPU, which follows the first R4000PC part, with an R4000MC – multi-processing chip – to follow. A basic Crimson/S compute server comes in at UKP24,000, whilst the Crimson/Entry, which comes with an eight-bitplane graphics subsystem including software Z-buffer, costs from UKP25,700. The Crimson/XS has an optional Z-buffer and Silicon Graphics’ geometry engine, and is claimed to do 250,000 three-dimensional vectors per second and costs from UKP31,700. A Crimson/XS24 is from UKP33,430 and includes 24-bitplane colour for full-colour imaging and solid modelling. The Crimson/Elan includes everything in the XS/24, plus hardware Z-buffer and four geometry engines, is reckoned to do one million three-dimensional vectors per-second and comes in at UKP36,870. Crimson/VGX and /VGXT use the high-performance graphics subsystems that feature in the Iris PowerVision machines, and cost from UKP60,000 and UKP85,850 respectively. Each comes with up to 256Mb RAM, 3.6Gb disk, two SCSI channels and four VME expansion slots. All ship in March, and Silicon Graphics emphasises that it is not aiming the Crimson series at the volume end of the workstation market. Meanwhile, MIPS Computer says the R4000MC is now being sampled by its semiconductor partners – Integrated Device Technology Inc, LSI Logic Corp, NEC Corp, Performance Semiconductor Corp, Siemens AG and Toshiba Corp – and expects volume production to begin by the middle of the year. MIPS says 75MHz implementations of the R4000 series are still expected by the year-end – they will do over 100 SPECmarks, the company claims.
