Silicon Graphics Announces New Multiprocessing IRIS PowerSeries 

Mountain View, CA (Oct 4 1988) - Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGIC-NASDAQ) 
today announced the IRIS PowerSeries, a series of high end 
multiprocessor systems which integrate Silicon Graphics' industry 
leading graphics technology with a level of computational power that 
provides the highest performance in both graphics and general 
computing available today. 

The IRIS PowerSeries consists of graphics systems and supercomputing 
servers and represents the new high end of the series of products 
available from Silicon Graphics. The Personal IRIS, the industry's 
first personal 3D graphics workstation was also introduced today. 

The IRIS PowerSeries is a series of six systems. Three are 
Supercomputing Servers which utilize the new POWERpath multiprocessing 
architecture from Silicon Graphics. The remaining three are Graphics 
Supercomputing Workstations which integrate the same multiprocessing 
technology with Silicon Graphics' industry leading graphics 
capability. The systems support up to four RISC CPU/FPU chip sets 
and use the newly introduced R3000 from MIPS Computer Systems. Large, 
sophisticated applications demonstrate the ability of the POWERpath 
architecture to sustain 80 MIPS and 16 MFLOPS (double precision 
Linpack) of delivered performance; an order of magnitude higher 
performance than currently available on engineering workstations. 

Unlike other systems which tie up the same CPU for both computational 
and graphics processing, the IRIS PowerSeries systems process 
graphics on a dedicated subsystem. This leaves the main CPUs with 
more power for computation and analysis and provides users with 
'immediate mode graphics -- graphics that are interactive with the 
evolution of the analysis being performed. 

Several major advances in technology have made this price vs.
performance breakthrough possible: five new proprietary VLSI 
chips; the innovative POWERpath multi-processing architecture; 
IRIX, a state-of-the-art multi-processing implementation of the 
UNIX operating system and an automatic parallelizing compiler. 

"The POWERpath architecture has been designed to serve as the 
basis for future generations of higher performance systems from 
Silicon Graphics, " commented Thomas Jermoluk, Vice President and 
General Manager of the Advanced Systems Division. "It will meet the 
needs of the most power-hungry users in computationally and 
graphically demanding fields such as visual simulation, molecular 
modeling, computational fluid dynamics, and medical imaging. 

The IRIS PowerSeries of multiprocessing systems includes a variety of 
models in both server and graphics configurations with prices beginning 
at $54,900, including, for the first time, a system that offers 80 MIPS 
and 16 MFLOPS for under $100,000.