Over in the UK for a three-dimensional computing exhibition, Silicon Graphics Inc vice-president Mark Perry revealed that the next addition to MIPS Computer Systems’ R series of RISC processors – the R4000 – will be sampling by the autumn and will go into volume production in January 1991. Existence of the part was first revealed here last summer, (CI No 1,289), and Perry says that it will match the 55 MIPS performance of MIPS’ R6000 ECL part – at least until MIPS turns up the 67.7MHz clock rate of the R6000 to 80MHz in the future. MIPS’ answer to IBM’s RS/6000 Unix challengers will be R4000-based systems out early next year, and tipped by Perry to out-perform the IBM machines. Silicon Graphics engineers have worked with MIPS on this and previous R series chips – where they are responsible for designing the hooks and functions required for multi-processing implementations. For its part, Silicon Graphics has no plans to do an R6000 machine, but it will be launching an R4000 system, and also plans a fully-configured workstation for less than $10,000 next year. In addition, Silicon Graphics has cut prices on its Personal Iris 3D workstations by up to 30%. The 4D/20 with 200Mb disk is down to UKP300, while a diskless version is UKP8,600. The Mountain View, California company has also signed up Matra Datavision SA to sell on its boxes and to do a version of its 3D CAD/CAM Euclid-IS software to the the Silicon Graphics machines. Perry also says that the company is planning further joint ventures with IBM in the three-dimensional graphics arena following their collaboration on the top-end RS/6000s which are configured with graphics hardware and software from Silicon Graphics. Perry added that the reason for delays in shipping the the new IBM systems lies in problems with the AIX 3.0 Unixalike operating system.
