SGI turns up 'juice' with new machines
SILICON Graphics (SGI) has announced a series of new products and technologies that it hopes will keep it as the world's premier platform for high-end graphics in business, engineering and entertainment.
At the top of its new workstations is the Onyx InfiniteReality, a small box the size of a television set.
It can deliver more than 10 million polygons per second and is able to download more than 200 MB per second of image data into the visualisation pipeline. It also has a pixel fill rate of over 800 million textured, anti-aliased pixels per second.
According to SGI, the Onyx InfiniteReality system is up to 100 times faster than its previous top-of-the line system, the Onyx RealityEngine2.
At the desktop level, SGI announced the Indigo2 IMPACT 10000, a workstation based on its new MIPS RISC R10000 microprocessor.
This machine is specifically designed for 3D solid modelling and is said to be four times faster than its predecessor, the Indigo2 XZ, and is also cheaper.
SGI will also be upgrading the smallest member of its graphics workstations, the Indy.
The new Indy will be powered by the MIPS R5000 microprocessor and will feature the XGE graphics architecture.
Christopher Migdal, a member of the technical staff for the advanced systems division at SGI, said that the new machines were far more powerful than the older ones.
'I am just an engineer so it always amazes me when I see what the artists can do with our equipment,' he said.
