NEWS BRIEFS

Mountain View, CA — SGI announced new trade-in promotions and processor and graphics upgrade availability for its award-winning UNIX operating system based visual workstations. This announcement reinforces the company’s commitment to providing ongoing investment protection and the most flexible upgrade paths in the industry for its workstation customers.

“We’re delivering unmatched features and value to UNIX workstation professionals, not only with our systems’ industry-leading capabilities but with their modularity and upgradability,” said Greg Goelz, vice president of marketing for workstations and IA servers at SGI. “The new upgrades and trade- in promotions offer UNIX customers an easy and extremely affordable option for taking advantage of our latest performance advancements and innovations on our IRIX desktop systems.”

With the new trade-in promotion, customers will receive substantial credits toward the purchase of the new high-performance and innovative desktop workstations running the IRIX operating system: the Silicon Graphics O2 visual workstation with the powerful 400 MHz MIPS R12000A processor announced today or the new Silicon Graphics Octane2 visual workstation with the company’s breakthrough VPro graphics announced in June. Customers will receive a credit of up to $9,000 toward the purchase of any new Octane2 or Silicon Graphics Octane visual workstation when they trade in older-generation Octane systems and up to $3,500 toward the purchase of any new O2 visual workstation when they trade in older-generation O2 systems. The company also offers credits for customers wishing to trade in UNIX workstations from other vendors, with credits ranging from $500 to $3,000 toward the purchase of a new Silicon Graphics visual workstation.*

In addition to the trade-in promotions, SGI offers current O2 and Octane customers exceptional price/performance value by providing affordable upgrade paths to the latest processor and graphics performance. Octane and O2 customers can upgrade to the new 400 MHz MIPS processors for substantial CPU performance improvements with a simple board swap. Octane customers will see better than 30% improvement in CPU performance over the 300 MHz R12000 processors, while O2 customers will see an up to 45% improvement over the 300 MHz R12000 processors. For O2 customers, this processor upgrade also results in a 27% or greater graphics performance boost due to the unique O2 Unified Memory Architecture. Customers who return their older processors will receive credit towards the upgrade U.S. list price.

Octane customers can upgrade their graphics capabilities to the visualization power of the new VPro graphics for Octane2, which offer more than three times the graphics performance of Octane graphics. Credit towards the U.S. list price for the new graphics purchase is given with the return of any previous Octane graphics configuration.

SGI provides a broad range of high-performance computing and advanced graphics solutions that enable customers to understand and conquer their toughest computing problems. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with offices worldwide, the company is located on the Web at http://www.sgi.com .

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