Silicon Graphics yesterday announced its latest addition to its Personal Iris range of Unix-based graphics workstations. The 4D/35 uses the latest CPU from MIPS – the R3000A. Silicon Graphics claims that the new machine triples the floating point performance of the existing Iris workstations and outperforms all other general pupose workstations on the market today. Running at 35MHz, the new machine is rated at 33 MIPS, 6 MFLOPS and has a SPECmark rating of 23. Silicon Graphics has developed five new ASICs for the new machine: a processor interface controller; a high performance input-output controller; an interrupt controller; DRAM module interface; and a cache parity debug controller. The 4D/35 has 64Kb instruction cache, 64Kb data cache and up to 128Mb for main memory. Input-ouput is handled in burst mode. A Motorola signal processor controls four user serial lines capable of running at up to 2.5Mbits per second and provides input-output for for analogue and digital stereo sound. The new 4D/35 is available as an upgrade to existing Iris us ers. Out in January 1991, it’s UKP16,000 and Silicon Graphics is making a general purpose compute server version available for UKP8,330.
