Silicon Graphics Inc, Mountain View, California is already souping up its bottom-end Indy multimedia workstation with a faster chip. The company has introduced the Indy R4400, which replaces the 100MHz R4000PC chip in the present version with a 150MHz MIPS R4400, boosting performance by over 50% – and speeding two- and three-dimensional graphics performance to 1.6m X lines per second and 800,000 three-dimensional vectors per second – but at a susbtantially higher price. The original Indy sells for $5,000 diskless but the new one, available in March, costs from $15,500, which buys Virtual24 bit – dithered 8-bit colour graphics, 32Mb main memory, 535Mb system disk, 16 1,280 by 1,024 resolution colour monitor, IndyCam colour digital video camera, keyboard, mouse, Irix 5.1 operating system and Indigo Magic user environment. It is aimed at computer-aided design, photo retouching, animation, video production and media authoring applications the firm says.
