Application Performance Increases by Up to 100 Percent For No Additional Cost
Silicon Graphics, Inc. today announced it is dramatically increasing the speed of its entry-level Indy(tm) workstation with no increase in price. The entry Indy system leads the industry in price/performance by now delivering 62.8 SPECint92 and 49.9 SPECfp92, resulting in a performance boost that doubles the speed of many popular software applications.
"Indy is shaping the very nature of desktop computing," said Thomas Jermoluk, president and chief operating officer of Silicon Graphics. "No other computer has evolved so dramatically in such a short time. In only eight months, Indy has grown from a popular new desktop system to one of the world's most lauded computer product lines, matching its remarkable array of technologies with solid price/performance that is driving its acceptance in collaborative engineering and creative environments everywhere."
While maintaining its original competitive pricing, the entry Indy system now delivers overall application performance of 59.2 AIM benchmark points, a boost of more than 64 percent over the AIM performance of the original entry Indy. Indy now also offers faster entry graphics performance, with X performance growing from 1.1 million X lines/second to 1.4 million X lines/second. 3D performance is also enhanced, with the new entry Indy delivering 33K Tmesh/second, compared to the original entry Indy's 22K Tmesh/second.
The dramatic performance boost comes from a specially optimized 100MHz MIPS(r) R4600(tm) PC RISC microprocessor, which replaces the MIPS R4000(r)PC processor that shipped with the original entry Indy system. Indy based on the R4000PC CPU, predecessor to the binary-compatible R4600PC processor in the Indy system, was rated at 36 SPECint92, 37 SPECfp92, with an AIM benchmark of 36.2.
The new microprocessor is designed for single-processor desktop computing, doubling the internal instruction and data cache of the original Indy system's R4000PC. Entry Indy system users will especially benefit in 2D computing environments such as computer-aided design, image manipulation, desktop publishing and creative arts. The new R4600 microprocessor doubles the performance of Indy in the San Diego benchmark for the popular AutoCAD(tm) desktop design package, achieving a 22:00 minute San Diego "create model test" completion time compared to the 44:19 minute result turned in by the Indy R4000PC. Adobe Photoshop(tm) test results show similar performance gains, particularly for CPU-intensive tasks such as rotating 10MB images, which are executed 90 percent faster on the new entry Indy.
Entry Indy performance also is aided by a new, optimized version of Silicon Graphics' IRIX(tm) operating system. IRIX 5.2 features the same media-rich feature set as the preceding IRIX 5.1 version, but significant code optimizations result in faster performance while requiring even less available memory. This faster, enhanced version of IRIX is shipping on all Silicon Graphics systems.
The new entry Indy configuration is available immediately and includes the 100MHz R4600 Indy system, Virtual24(tm) bit (dithered 8-bit) color graphics, 16MB of main memory, 15-inch 1,024-by- 768 resolution color monitor, IndyCam color digital video camera, keyboard, mouse, IRIX 5.2 operating system and the Indigo Magic user environment.
