Product News

June 11, 1999

SGI Ships Graphics Workstation with
Four-Processor Capability

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA, June 8 -- SGI has begun volume shipments of its Silicon Graphics 540 visual workstations. These graphics workstations, which are based on the Intel and Windows NT platform, offer users the capability to scale up to four processors on a single desktop system.

According to Tom Furlong, vice president and general manager of SGI's Workstation Division, "The system's unique four-processor scalability allows customers to dramatically decrease rendering times and improve real-time productivity without having to burden the user with pricey system upgrades."

The Silicon Graphics 540 is designed to deliver scalability to engineers, video editors, scientists, and animators running processor-intensive analysis applications such as Kinetix's 3D Studio Max. According to SGI, in rendering test results on 100 animation images with effects -- running on two, then four 500MHz Intel Pentium III Xeon processors -- the Silicon Graphics 540 demonstrated a 40-percent increase in application performance when scaling up to the maximum processor support.

The Silicon Graphics 540 is priced beginning at $6,495 (U.S. list). It can be configured with up to four 550MHz Intel Pentium III Xeon processors and 2GB of ECC SDRAM memory. The system comes standard with six available PCI expansion slots, two available storage bays, integrated floppy drive, 32X Max CD-ROM, and Ultra2 SCSI hard drive with up to 54GB disk capacity. Other features include 10/100Base-T, USB, S-video, composite video and audio, and with additional software, IEEE-1394.