InformationWeek Daily 01/04/99
Silicon Graphics Inc. will finally introduce its first Windows
NT workstations next week. Silicon Graphics will sell the
machines, which were originally scheduled for the fourth
quarter of last year, on a build-to-order basis.
Silicon Graphics' Visual Workstation 320 with a 400-MHz
Pentium II will start at around $3,995. It will also be
available with dual processors. The high-end 540 model,
starting at around $5,995, will ship with a 450-MHz Xeon
processor and will be available with up to four Xeon
processors.
SGI has duplicated components in its high-performance Unix
machines for the NT market. "The result is an extremely fast
system at an extremely competitive price," says Jon Peddie, a
Tiburon, Calif., researcher on graphics technologies. Other
vendors use specialized graphics chips, known as graphics
subsystems, to give workstations their powerful rendering
capabilities. But Silicon Graphics' cheapest NT workstations
eliminate these components and instead incorporate graphics
capabilities into their core-logic chipsets, which route data
between the CPU and memory. This cuts costs while boosting
performance, says Peddie. Silicon Graphics' high-performance
NT workstations will incorporate both technologies. --Tom
Davey |
