Silicon Graphics Inc announced Friday that it had licensed Dataram Corp to manufacture memory upgrades for its recently launched 320 and 540 Visual workstations. Princeton, New Jersey-based Dataram will manufacture 128Mb, 256Mb and 512Mb upgrades under its own name and sell thorugh its existing distributors, resellers and VARs.
The move is notable because of the criticism SGI received over integrated architecture of the new machines, its first systems designed to run Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT opearting system rather than its own Irix implementation of Unix. Inspired by its existing O2 Unix workstations, SGI provided a high-speed path between processor, memory, graphics and peripherals through its Visual Computing Architecture.
But the downside of this was that no standard memory would be available for memory upgrades from third parties. Competitors claimed, and customers worried, that this would lock users into expensive and proprietary memory technology available only from SGI itself. SGI claims its unique memory architecture gives it differentiation and performance advantages over PC-workstation vendors such as Dell Computer Corp and Compaq Computer Corp.
SGI has approved Dataram’s manufacturing processes and says it will provide user support services to customers using Dataram memory. Dataram, a 32 year-old company, has specialized in providing memory for graphics workstation users.
