Late on Monday, Mountain View-based Silicon Graphics Inc fulfilled its promise to bring out a new family if Iris Indigo RISC personal computers based on the 50MHz R4000SC RISC from its MIPS Technology subsidiary. The R4000, claimed to run at 70 SPECmarks, 85 MIPS and 16 MFLOPS, includes tightly integrated support for 1Mb secondary cache, a key element in the performance of the machine. Silicon Graphics claims a near 300% increase in performance over the original R3000A-based family of Iris Indigos.The firm points to the Khornerstone benchmark which measures system balance by testing disk input-output, floating point and processor-intensive tasks. According to the Workstation Labs independent test shop, the Iris Indigo R3000A system has the highest Khornerstone per dollar rating of any competing system and the Indigo R4000 is expected to improve upon this. The super-pipelined 64-bit R4000 enables up to two instructions to be issued per clock. The first five models are the R4000 Iris Indigo Entry at $12,500, the XS24 at $20,000; the Indigo Server at $11,400; the Indigo XS at $16,500 and the Indigo Elan at $32,000. Prices include 16Mb memory, colour monitor, keyboard, mouse, 16-bit audio subsystem and bundled tools currently on the Iris Indigo – Showcase, Explorer, media mosaic tools and the Irix implementation of Unix. All Iris Indigo R4000 configurations will ship in volume in September and the R4000 CPU is available as an upgrade to existing Iris Indigo customers for $9,000; the R3000s have also been reduced, with the R3000 Indigo Entry with 16Mb cut to $8,000 and the Indigo XS cut with 16Mb cut to $11,500 – wait to buy until August 1 to get the new prices. There is a new 10Mbyte-per-second 1Gb disk drive to give a maximum internal storage of 3Gb. Fast SCSI II is now standard in all Iris Indigo systems and memory prices have been reduced by up to 36% too.
