3DS & Pentium
As the other notes suggest, getting the speed and photorealism of an SCI
Crimson is a much costlier proposition than just $15,000 for an Indigo. As far
as the SGI attaining a higher mips rating than the 486, true. BUT the R4000
Risc chip must execute many more instructions to generate the same high level
function that the Cisc 486 chip may carry out in one clock cycle. I've been
running an application that is very floating point math intensive on both
systems and see little difference in execution times. SGI's claim to fame is
it's graphics technology, both software and hardware. Microsoft has licensed
the Iris Graphics Library from SGI for possible inclusion into Windows and
Windows NT in the future. I'm hoping that SGI is an avid supporter/user of NT
(it'll do wonders for their ease of use and application availability, and help
their stock prices). WIth NT out I think you'll start seeing multiprocessor
systems using both the R4000 and Intel 486/586 chips. This is when we'll see
even lower prices for significantly faster machines.
Jeff Flinn
It's Technical, Inc.