Silicon Graphics Inc yesterday duly unveiled its Indigo2 Impact line of three-dimensional graphics and imaging workstations with choice of 250MHz or 200MHz MIPS R4400 processor. The Impact is described as the result of a new strategy for accelerated collaboration between Silicon Graphics engineers and the company’s leading-edge customers and software developers, and supports a string of new custom third-party applications for computer-aided design and engineering, geographic information systems, film and video production, chemistry, games development and visual simulation. Claimed to offer the world’s fastest three-dimensional graphics and imaging performance on the desktop – three times the three-dimensional performance and as much as 100 times the complex visualisation power of the company’s Indigo2 Extreme. It includes texture mapping, volume rendering, high definition television resolution and professional digital media features. The graphics subsystem is driven by eight new custom-designed ASICs designed by Silicon Graphics and manufactured by Toshiba Corp to process three-dimensional graphics, imaging and photorealistic textures to generate a record 100m trilinear interpolations per second for advanced visualisation. It is also one of the first machines to use the new Rambus Inc 500MHz memory subsystem, of which Toshiba is a licensee, for unprecedented fill rates. The Rambus, which derives from work done at MIPS Technologies Inc, now a Silicon Graphics company, replaces the conventional control signals and multiplexed address of the conventional dynamic memory with a packet-oriented bus clocked at 250MHz, which delivers a 9-bit byte at each extremity of the cycle, one every 2nS. Applications for the Impact are on offer from Alias/Wavefront Inc, Biosym Inc, CADCentre Ltd, Deneb Robotics Inc, Discreet Logic Inc, Landmark Graphics Corp, Paradigm Simulation Inc, Structural Dynamics Research Corp and Vision International Inc. The two models are the High Impact and Maximum Impact with double the three-dimensional and imaging capabilities. The Indigo2 High Impact is available this quarter with 250MHz and 200MHz CPU at $40,000 and $35,000 respectively. The Maximum Impact and Power Indigo2 Maximum Impact are available with the 250MHz MIPS R4400 and the 75MHz R8000 respectively. The Maximum Impact is $51,000, next quarter, Power Indigo2 Maximum Impact is $60,000. All base configurations feature 64Mb CPU, 2Gb system disk, 2Mb cache and 19 1,280 by 1,024 colour monitor.
