Responding to Sun Microsystems Inc’s low-cost Darwin Unix workstation announcement Silicon Graphics Inc has stuffed a 250MHz MIPS R10000 RISC into its Octane MXE workstation and added new E-series graphics accelerator said to perform up to 40% faster than previous models. It costs $25,000 without the graphics card or $48,000 with. SGI claims the new configuration outperforms Sun’s 300MHz UltraSparc II with Elite3D m6 graphics by 18% percent running Dassault Systemes’ Catia CAD/CAM software. SGI’s existing 175MHz Octane/SI entry-level model now costs $14,000 with 128Mb RAM and 4Gb hard disk. SGI will make the 250MHz MIPS R10000 available on all Octane models – SI, SSI and MXE – this quarter.
