Silicon Graphics Inc, determined not to let the recent Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co workstation announcements put it in the shade, will this week upgrade its entry-level Indy desktop with a 100MHz MIPS Technologies Inc R4600PC Orion part, leaving the price at $5,000. It is rated at 62.8 SPECint92 and 49.9 SPECfp92 up from the 36 SPECint92 and the 37 SPECfp92 marks of the original R4000-based Indy. For $5,000, a diskless system comes with 16Mb RAM, 15 colour screen, dithered 8-bit colour graphics, the IndyCam colour digital video camera, optional IndyVideo board, Indigo Magic user environment and a new optimised Irix 5.2 Unix System V.4 implementation. It can take up to 256Mb RAM, 2Gb disk and seven SCSI II devices. The new Indy is more powerful, but also more expensive than its nearest Sun rival, the 70MHz microSparc-based SparcStation 5 Aurora, and is similar in performance to, but more expensive than the HP 712/60 Gecko, although it compares favourably when loaded with 32Mb RAM, 535Mb disk, 16 1,280 by 1,040 colour screen and IndyCam at $7,000. Indy is Silicon Graphics’s leading unit volume product. The 100MHz R4600PC replaces the R4000PC – primary cache – and has 16Kb data, and 16Kb instruction cache, double that of the R4000PC. Silicon Graphics says the optimised Irix 5.2 requires 20% less RAM and runs such applications as PhotoShop and AutoCAD twice as fast as the first Indy.
