Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) has just made its first foray into the Wintel' (Windows/Intel) world with its new Xeon and NT-based Visual Workstation 320 and 450 models. Despite its reputation for engineering excellence, SGI has steadily lost market share in the workstation arena and is looking to the NT workstation market to revive its fortunes. Although the new Visual Workstation systems will be built to order and solid direct, manufacturing as well as call-center and on-site subport will be out-sourced.

As a newcomer to the Wintel workstation market, SGI will be up against formidable and established opposition from companies like Compaq, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. In its favor, SGI's background in 3D graphics and integration has allowed it to take a fresh approach to workstation design. However, it's clear that SGI has leant heavily towards performance when calculating the trade-off between performance and upgradeability in its new workstations.

Graphics, audio and video will all be integrated into the system board and the system will use two of SGI's key architecture technologies: Integrated Visual Computing (IVC) and the Lithium chip. In SGI's low-cost O2 range the IVC architecture was known as the Unified Memory Architecture (UMA). Here, all the primary subsystems CPU, memory, graphics, audio and disk are integrated into one unified system.

One of the most notable features of the IVC is that it allows the Cobalt graphics controller to use system RAM as video RAM. SGI's more powerful Octane and Origin machines all feature a multi-port crossbar switch', which is responsible for routeing communications between three subsystems. In the Visual Workstations a similar component called the Lithium chip will be used to perform the same task, effectively allowing all the key components to use dedicated pathways directly to the process.

(Courtesy PC Magazine)