Included in the new figures from the Systems Performance valuation Co-operative (CI No 1,408) are results of Silicon Graphics’ recently introduced top-end multi-processing 4D/300 workstations and 4D/300S servers in its Power series of graphics systems. With up to eight 33MHz Mips Computer Systems R3000 RISC chips the 4D/380S is rated at 234 MIPS and 32.7 MFLOPS, comes with from 8Mb to 256Mb memory – using 4Mb memory chips – and, with the full complement of eight CPUs, costs UKP173,950. The 4D/340S runs four of the parts, whilst the 4D/320S employs two, performs at 59.2 MIPS and 11.6 MFLOPS, again comes with from 8Mb to 256Mb memory, and costs UKP64,350. All the 300 family run Silicon Graphics’ symmetrical multi-processing Unix implemntation known as IRIX, which includes some real-time enhancements and enables multiple tasks to run on individual processors or one job to run on all processors simultaneously. Each system can be configured with 36.7Gb disk, 64 ports, SCSI interface and Ethernet. They come with Silicon Graphics’ new implementation of the IPI2 disk subsystem – IPI2X – which is claimed to double the input-output performance of existing 4D/200 Power machines, supporting disk striping with a transfer rate of 6Mb per second. The 4D/300s are binary compatible with all Silicon Graphics systems and existing 4D/200 users can board-upgrade from now. Over the last few months Silicon Graphics has re-vamped its entire line of three-dimensional workstations in response to new releases from the likes of IBM, Stardent and Hewlett-Packard, and is meeting the so called ‘wide word’ vendors of 64-bit graphics superminis such as Alliant Computer Systems and Convex Computer head-on.
