Three-dimensional workstation specialist Silicon Graphics Inc has been talking for some time about extending its product line with multi-processor versions of its Iris workstations, but this week the company also came up with a low-cost personal workstation for the bottom end of the market, along with a series of three per second. The UKP15,000 4D/20 […]
Three-dimensional workstation specialist Silicon Graphics Inc has been talking for some time about extending its product line with multi-processor versions of its Iris workstations, but this week the company also came up with a low-cost personal workstation for the bottom end of the market, along with a series of three per second. The UKP15,000 4D/20 workstation, aimed at computer aided design, animation, simulation and molecular modelling applications, is based on the 12.5MHz RISC processor from MIPS Computer Systems, with 8Mb memory, 170Mb internal disk drive, and 19 colour monitor with 1,290 by 1,024 resolution. The worksta tion includes the Silicon Graphics proprietary graphics subsys tem, and the company ays that advances in VLSI technology has enabled it to shrink the five board set used in higher end sys tems onto a single board. A 4D/20G model, costing UKP23,000, adds 24 colour bit planes and 24 bit Z-buffer for hidden surface removal. At the top end is the new Power Iris range, topped by the 80 MIPS – some of these ratings need to be taken with a pinch of salt – 4D/240 using four 25MHz RISC chips from MIPS, designed to allow complex graphical analysis and display to run in paral lel with dynamic calculations. Prices in the UK range from UKP106,000 for the 240, down to UKP91,000 for the three-processor 220 and UKP76,000 for the two-processor 120 model.
