IBM must be beginning to wonder what hit it when it entered the workstation world in a serious manner with the RS/6000 machines – Silicon Graphics Inc claims that the top-end MIPS Computer Systems Inc 40MHz R3000A-based Iris 4D/400 in its new Iris Power Series is the highest performance RISC system available and the first to use the 40MHz version of the part with a blinding SPEC Thruput rating of 159. The company also claims low-end minisupercomputer performance of 286 MIPS and 70 MFLOPS for the machine – which has a vast 9Mb of cache memory. The 4D/400 Series symmetric multiprocessing systems come in two, four and eight processor versions and support the Mountain View, California compa ny’s VGX and GTX graphics subsystems, and can also be used as network servers. Server prices go from $64,900 for the two pro cessor 4D/420S to $164,900 for the eight processor 4D/480S. The graphics sys tems are rather pricier, starting at $94,900 for the 4D/420GTX, and rising to $224,900 for the top-of- the-line 4D/480VGX. De liveries begin in 60 days.
