Silicon Graphics' Wintel Killer

SGI beefs up the low end of its 3-D graphics workstation line with the power-packed O2.

Dave Rowell

Just when NT-based Pentium Pro PCs are looking like hot 3-D machines (see "Affordable 3-D Workstations," December 1996 BYTE), Silicon Graphics, Inc., introduces the sexy blue O2 . Replacing the Indy in SGI's workstation lineup, the O2 is built from scratch to handle complex video and graphics -- and street pricing starts below $6000.

In our OpenGL 3-D graphics testing , the O2 ran well against the latest Intel systems. With professional video applications, it should provide an even-better bang fo r the buck. I was impressed by the O2's ability to distort a live video stream in real time.

The O2 architecture, a unified memory design on steroids, dynamically allocates the system memory among double-frame buffers, a 24-bit z-buffer, and virtually unlimited texture storage, all through a 2.1-GBps memory bus. With independent "engines" for memory control and rendering, display, imaging, compression, and I/O control, the 64-bit 180-MHz Mips R5000 CPU has little left to do.

The memory and rendering engine efficiently gates access to system memory (up to 1 GB of SDRAM DIMMs) with crossbar switching. The rendering component provides hardware acceleration for triangle setup, z-buffering, and textured and nontextured rasterization with up-to-32-bit RGBA graphics modes. The O2's display engine supports up to 1280- by 1024-pixel displays, as well as screen capturing and video-format conversion in real time without CPU overhead.

The imaging and compression engine performs real-time JPEG for nonlinear editing as well as MPEG-1 hardware decoding. It supports Cinepak, QuickTime, and AVI codecs (but not in real time). With a programmable 66-MHz R3000 integer core, it will handle future formats.

The O2 can maintain simultaneous analog or digital video streams. It also has two wide UltraSCSI channels, built-in 10/100Base-T Ethernet, and a 64-bit PCI slot. An optional $1000 AV module provides the jacks for video and audio equipment, including the O2's digital camera.

Irix 6.3 has a new Web-based user interface, which allows such things as hyperlinks within the extensive on-line documentation. SGI's applications suite lets you edit images, video, HTML, and VRML. Also bundled is Netscape's Navigator 3.0 and FastTrack Server 2.0, as well as Insignia's SoftWindows 2.0.

With price/performance numbers that match or exceed those of NT workstations, the O2 destroys any rationale to leave the SGI camp to run professional applications recently ported to NT.

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Where to Find

O2 Workstation.........................$8,342 (estimat
ed street price)

  (With 128 MB of RAM, 512-KB L2 cache,
   two 2-GB SCSI hard drives, 17-inch 
   monitor, and external floppy drive)
Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Mountain View, CA
Phone:    (800) 800-7441 or (415) 960-1980
Fax:      (415) 961-0595
Internet: 
http://www.sgi.com/

Circle 1062 on Inquiry Card.

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Ratings

Technology        *****
Implementation    *****
Performance       ****



Key

***** Outstanding
 **** Very Good
  *** Good
   ** Fair
    * Poor

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3-D Graphics Performance

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SGI's Little Blue O2

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The O2 packs lots of video, imaging, and 3-D graphics power into a small, modular package.

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Dave Rowell is a BYTE senior technical editor. You can reach him at drowell@bix.com .