SGI cuddles up to BOXX

IT APPEARS that SGI has partnered up with BOXX Technologies to supply the next generation of SGI Dual Core Xeon deskside and rack mount workstations. The systems will be branded as Silicon Graphics Visual Solutions (VSS) with the first model called the VSS40.

The base systems will have support for up to two Dual Core Xeon 5140 (2.33GHz) or 5160 (3.0GHz) processors using an Intel 5000DX chipset. By using the latest chipset from Intel, SGI will be able to take advantage of up to 32GB in eight Fully Buffered DIMMS slots.

Out of the gate, users will have the ability to select from nVIDIA's Quadro FX 1500, FX 4500, FX 4500 X2, and the FX 5500 video cards through a single x16 PCI-Express slot. Support is planned by SGI for the new Quadro Plex 1000 series from nVIDIA and will be adopted shortly after general product availability.

SGI's InfinateStorage solution will be an optional supported add-on for the workstations. Multiple external interfaces for the InfinateStorage will be supported including 2 and 4Gbit Fibre Channel, either Gigabit or 10Gigabit Ethernet, as well as Ultra320 SCSI.

Current plans are for SGI to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, as well as Windows XP. SGI Altix systems, as well as Itanium2 based systems will still be continued to be produced by SGI. According to SGI and BOXX representatives, systems should be shipping shortly. µ

Rob Squires is reporting from Siggraph