Now in the position of having to keep the wolves from its door, Silicon Graphics Inc’s showing signs of getting a competitive marketing program in place, yesterday offering users of DEC, Fujitsu, HP, Convex, IBM, NEC, Sun, Intel, Meiko and Think Machines technical and scientific computers aggressive trade-in terms for turning over their existing equipment and buying a new Cray J90se vector supercomputer. For 90 days SGI will give users a credit worth half the value of their existing system towards up to half of the system cost of a J90se which uses Cray’s proprietary CMOS chip and runs the Unicos operating system. SGI’s making a big play to win new business for the second iteration of the J90 – the same trade-in rates apply to users of older generation Cray X-MP, Y-MP and Y-MP EL systems.
