SGI moves against 'Wintel.'

Electronic News, Oct 7, 1996 by Cynthia Bournellis

Mountain View, Calif.--As part of a defensive move against "Wintel," Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) has revamped its product line. The company will this week roll out a number of new systems, ranging from high-performance servers to deskside products to low-cost desktop workstations based on new architectures.

The new O2 workstation is designed to replace Silicon Graphics' low-end Indy workstation family. A viable component of the O2 is its Unified Memory Architecture (UMA). O2 desktop workstations integrate UMA and advanced 3-D graphics, image processing, video and compression with a 64-bit MIPS RISC R5000 or R10000 processor. The O2 is designed so that graphics, video and the CPU have direct access to the memory subsystem through a 2.1 gigabits-per-second bus. "With this product, we've solved the limitations of the shared bus," said Steve Proffitt, a product marketing manager for the O2 line.

The O2 features a new Web-user environment for Web page authoring. Every system comes bundled with Netscape Navigator 3.0 and Netscape FastTrack Server 2.0 for publishing data on the Internet or corporate intranets. It also comes with SGI's Cosmo Create WYSIWYG Hypertext Markup Language page layout tool for the creation of multimedia Web pages and Cosmo Worlds, SGI's Virtual Reality Markup Language authoring system for developing interactive 3-D worlds for applications such as 3-D training. The O2 also ships with Insignia SoftWindows, which supports a range of applications running under Windows 3.1 or Windows 95.

The new systems are favorably priced to compete with Pentium Pro and future machines based on Intel's emerging Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) technology. "With AGP, Intel will have about one-third of the bandwidth of this system," said Mr. Proffitt. Nine configurations will be available, with prices ranging from $5,995 for entry-level R5000 models to $18,000 for high-end R10000 systems. "The sweet spot will be the $8,500 range...we will go hard after the sub-$10,000 workstation market," said Mr. Proffitt, adding that O2 will have a small slice of the Windows NT pie and a much larger share of the manufacturing, sciences, medical imaging and entertainment markets.

O2 isn't the least expensive system out there, but it is the most aggressive pricing analysts said they've seen from SGI for the low end. Therefore, O2 is expected to give SGI the boost it needs in this arena. And given the threat of Windows NT, as it casts an even bigger shadow in this market, the O2 is probably the right response, according to a number of industry watchers.

"SGI is making a defensive strategy by coming out with a low-cost Unix box that has the best graphics performance," noted Jim Garden, director of technical services at Technology Business Research, Inc. "They've taken the best attributes of a traditional workstation and have created a new breed of desktop workstations."

For example, the O2 combines the capabilities of Unix with a PC emulator for running personal applications such as PowerPoint on one system, as opposed to using two systems: a workstation for CAD functions and a PC for personal applications.

Systems based on the R5000 will be positioned against NT-based workstations, such as Hewlett-Packard's Vectra, and Apple Computer's Power Macintosh systems. R10000 products will go up against low-end HP Unix systems and Sun Microsystems' entry-level Ultra workstation line, said Mr. Proffitt.

In addition, SGI is releasing its O2 Modeler workstation, which features a Web environment and the company's 3-D graphics capabilities, including texture mapping. The new bundled systems are targeted to make O2 ready to use in the manufacturing of realistic, solid models.

A big change for SGI is the company's new Origin family of servers. Origin systems are based on the new Scaleable Sharedmemory Multiprocessor (S2MP) architecture developed by SGI and its supercomputer subsidiary, Cray Research, Inc. Through a building block design, the S2MP architecture enables system scalability in a single 64-bit product line.

An inherent feature of S2MP is its ability to isolate hardware and software failures. SGI claimed it is the industry's first 64-bit cache-coherent, non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture. A NUMA system is one where the time it takes for a processor to access main memory may be different depending on which page of memory is being accessed. S2MP is an instance of NUMA, SGI said.

The Origin line scales from a single tower system, priced at $11,935, to a multi-track 128-processor system going for millions of dollars. The new line consists of the Origin200 tower workgroup servers, which utilize the MIPS R10000 chip. It comes as a stand-alone tower that can be rack-mounted in a standard 19-inch enclosure. "Its price will push it into the Windows NT space," said Ed Reidenbach, marketing manager for the Advanced Systems division at SGI.

The Origin2000 high-performance deskside servers expand from one to 64 R10000 processors. Also in the line is the Cray Origin2000 supercomputing server. It scales 65-128 R10000 processors for performance of 50 gigaflops.