Multimedia software on bargain-basement machines running Windows NT has started to put pressure on Silicon Graphics Inc, and late last month it responded with a remake of its entire product line to embrace the new R10000 and R5000 RISCs from its MIPS Technologies Inc unit (CI No 2,835). Given the number of Unix RISC and iAPX-86 vendors now also out to eat Silicon Graphics’s prized high-margin graphics and interactive multimedia lunch, the announcement was surprisingly low-key. Although with the things sporting a rating of 8.11, Silicon Graphics appears to have the fastest SPECint_base95 boxes now on the market, the 200MHz R10000’s floating-point system performance – it’s rated at 10.5 SPECfp_base95 – is only 10% or so up on the R8000, the processor that it replaces in the firm’s higher-end machines.

InfiniteReality

Silicon Graphics needs stellar floating point performance to drive its traditional strength in graphics. If Silicon Graphics’s focus runs to a more general purpose system focus then it’s going to find itself slap bang in the middle of a fire fight that Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems Inc, IBM Corp and Digital Equipment Corp are already waging with each other. Top of Silicon Graphics’s system pile following the makeover is an Onyx InfiniteReality graphics supercomputer that is claimed to process geometric, imaging and video data concurrently in real time and up to 100 times faster than the current Onyx Reality. Silicon Graphics sees the 24-way R10000- or R4400-based InfiniteReality being used in applications such as the creation of entire virtual sets in television studios, so that the news correspondent from the latest war zone could deliver his piece to camera apparently from in the middle of a nasty sniper fight where in fact he is standing safe in London or New York in the next studio to the newscaster. The new R10000 and R4400 versions of the Onyx can be configured with up to three InfiniteReality or RealityEngine2 graphics subsystems, 64Mb to 16Gb main memory and up to 6.2Tb of disk. A two-way 200MHz R10000-based system starts at $208,000; the R4400 model begins at $199,000. Both will ship this quarter and come with 16Mb of texture memory, 64Mb of main memory, 2Gb disk and a 21 screen. Silicon Graphics has also created a monster uniprocessor workstation combining the Onyx architecture and InfinteReality subsystem. The i-Station 10000 is priced at from $125,000 – initially with a single R4400 processor, including 16Mb of texture memory, 64Mb of main memory, 2Gb disk, two display channels and a 21 screen. New R10000-based high-end Power Challenge server models are rated up to two and a half times faster than the current ones, which use 90MHz versions of the floating-point intensive R8000 TFP part. The 200MHz R10000 units come with from two to 36 processors and deliver up to 14 GFLOPS. They are rated at 8.9 SPECint95 and 12.3 SPECfp95, 8.11 SPECint_base95 and 10.5 SPECfp_base95.

By William Fellows

A two-way iteration of the machine starts at $88,800, and additional processors are priced at $50,000 per pair. And the R8000-based systems are upgradable to R10000. The mid-range Challenge Server line gets an R10000 makeover – the two- to 12- way Challenge L and XL start at $88,800 and $138,800 respectively. An R5000-based Challenge S is available with a 150MHz or 180MHz processor, and is priced at from under $10,000 as a fully-configured World Wide Web server, Silicon Graphics says. A one-to-four way 200MHz R4400 Challenge DM is now priced at from $30,000. The new Indigo2 Impact 10000 line of general purpose desktop workstations using the R10000 are claimed to be two to three times faster than their predecessors that use the MIPS R4400. The uniprocessors start at $43,000 (High Impact 10000) and $55,000 (Maximum Impact 10000), and they ship next quarter. A new entry-level graphics workstation using a 200MHz R4400 is called Indigo2 Solid Impact and is designed for solid modeling; it starts at $22,000 with 32Mb main memory, 1Gb disk and 20 screen. A 250MHz version is pric

ed at $27,000 and an R10000 version will cost from $34,000, both with 64Mb of main memory, 2Gb disk and 20 monitor. A new entry-level desktop graphics Indy R5000 series with a new XGE graphics subsystem will offer 80% better performance than existing Indys, Silicon Graphics promises. A 150MHz R5000PC (primary cache) model starts at $8,500; the 150MHz R5000SC (with 500Kb secondary cache) is priced from $11,500; and there is a 180MHz R5000SC with 500Kb Level 2 cache. All come with 8-bit XGE graphics, 1Gb disk, 32Mb RAM and 17 screen. All are due this quarter, along with a $6,500, 133MHz R4600 – Integrated Device Technology Inc Orion- based Indy with 32Mb RAM, 500Mb disk and 17 screen. Impresario Silicon Graphics has also created a new IndyStudio line around the Indy R5000 specifically for interactive three-dimensional work, digital video and animation developers, plus online publishers. The entry-level price point is $13,500, including pre-bundled versions of Silicon Graphics’s Alias/Wavefront Composer Lite, Adobe PhotoShop 3.0, Illustrator 5.5, MetaTools Kai’s Power Tools 2.0.1, Silicon Graphics’s Network File System implementation, Iris Impresario and Insignia Solutions Plc’s SoftWindows 2.0, said to be a $4,500 value. With Alias/Wavefront Animator the price rises to $16,000; $18,500 with Composer and $20,000 with PowerAnimator. A new Iris FailSafe failover module is available for clustering Challenge servers; software for two Challenge S servers starts at $8,000. On Challenge DM, L and XL or fully-stacked S is from $12,000. The company has now also released the 64-bit implementation of its Irix Unix. Version 6.2 includes Silicon Graphics’s XFS journalled file system, X/Open Co Ltd XPG4 Base 95 branding. MIPSPro 7.0 are new versions of the company’s R-Series compiler set which will ship in the spring.