Sgi Mixes Lithium, Cobalt, Arsenic In Nt Workstations

Computergram International, Jan 6, 1999

By William Fellows Silicon Graphics Inc will officially unveil its WinTel Visual Workstations next week as the dual-processor Model 320 and 540 quad. Because of the way SGI has integrated key technologies from its MIPS RISC desktops into the Visual PCs, it's thought that the company's key Unix markets, including engineering and imaging will quickly develop an appetite for the boxes.

It hopes to provide more substantial competition for Sun Microsystems Inc than the current NT offerings. The basic Visual Workstation 320 with a 400MHz Pentium II will start at around $4,000 with up to 1Gb RAM. It will also be available with dual processors and 350MHz and 450MHz chips, with a 512Kb L2 cache standard. The high-end 540 model, starting at around $6,000, will ship with a 450MHz Xeon processor and will accommodate up to four. Options include 512Kb, 1Mb or 2Mb L2 cache and up to 2Gb RAM. The technologies that SGI has taken to the new boxes from its MIPS RISC desktop heritage are certainly whetting the appetite of sections of the PC crowd. It seems SGI has integrated two key technologies from its O2 Unix workstation lines into the Visual PCs. The IVC Integrated Visual Computing Architecture * UMA, or the Unified Memory Architecture as it was in O2 * consists of the memory, CPU, network, audio, graphics and the disk (via the PCI bus and the ICE chips) integrated into a single unit. PC enthusiasts at ars-technica.com say: "The first thing that IVC means to a user is that you aren't going to have to fork over a ton of cash for expensive texture RAM. In fact, you don't have to worry about video RAM at all ... with the IVC, your system RAM is your video RAM." It also gives the RAM a 3.2Gb-per-second pipe straight to the graphics core that is faster than 2.1Gbps bandwidth O2 offers. On board the IVC is Lithium, an implementation of the cross-bar chip used in SGI's Octane and Origin lines of SMP RISC boxes. "The Lithium chip acts as a router, of sorts, for the bus system. It gives I/O, networking, video, audio, disk, IEEE 1394 FireWire and USB a dedicated pipe to the processor(s)." Instead of forcing every component to share a few pathways, the 1.6Gbps Lithium crossbar "allows the key areas of bus system bottle-necking to break through the jam and get busy." The Octane workstation's internal project name, home of the original Lithium work was SpeedRacer, the site observes. Moreover this is not shared bandwidth, but a dedicated allotment that is controlled by the Lithium chip. "Aside from being able to play your MP3's skip-free while accessing the hard drive, this design gives applications an enormous backyard to romp in." The Cobalt chipset optimizes the performance of OpenGL and GDI under NT, provides multi-processor rendering and enables dynamic allocation assignment of graphics memory in system memory. The Arsenic chip handles generating the display signal for standard monitors and resolutions and the HDTV 1080P standard. Stereo viewing is due in the second quarter of 1999. At start-up, instead of "dragging the old BIOS dog, SGI chose to run with the PROM architecture they employ on their RISC machines." It is the "first noticeable clue that SGI is not coming into the PC world to produce a box that mimics every other manufacturer's offering." With PROM, "simply click on the system setup option at boot up and you will gain access to a powerful set of menu-based utilities to tune and administrate the hardware (and, in a limited way, the software) of your system." SGI will be outsourcing the field support for the build-to-order Visual Workstations to Rhode Island-based Integrated Technology Inc.