SGI delivers higher 'octane'

Last week, Silicon Graphics Inc. unveiled its Octane2 visual workstation,

which offers up to three times the price performance of its predecessors.

The new system is the first computer to include the company's VPro

graphics architecture, which delivers more visualization power than any

other Unix desktop, said Tim Gordon, Octane2 product manager. VPro has 128M

of graphics memory capacity and OpenGL on a chip for volume rendering and

imaging extensions, making it especially useful for defense and satellite

imaging.

The Octane2 V6 with 32M of graphics memory, a 400 MHz CPU and 256M of

system memory starts at $19,995 and offers three times the price performance

of the previous version, Gordon said. The Octane2 V8 has 128M of graphics

memory with identical features, offering double the performance at a price

of $24,995, which is 40 percent less than the previous model.