Silicon Graphics Inc has added 300-MHz R12000 CPUs to its mid- range Octane workstations, offering 35% better performance at no additional cost, it claims. It’s offering customers up to $7,500 credit if they trade in a competitive Unix system for an Octane, or $2,500 for its own Indy or Indigo2 users who are trading up. New Octanes start at $20,000. L2 cache is doubled to 2Mb. It’s difficult to see the trade-in program having much success. As SGI says, it is transitioning from its traditional business of supporting its own proprietary Unix operating systems, Irix and Unicos, to supporting additional operating systems such as Windows NT and Linux.