Industry-Leading Feature Set Designed for Customer Value

The Silicon Graphics® Octane2™ visual workstation with VPro™ graphics advances the state of the art on the power desktop.

Octane2 offers high-performance graphics in a high-bandwidth system for maximum performance and interactivity. Octane2 with VPro graphics features OpenGL on a Chip™ for full hardware acceleration of the OpenGL® 1.2 pipeline. The integrated image and texture engine dramatically speeds up texture loading for fast rendering of large, complex models or volumetric data. High speed, configurable graphics memory allows you to customize and vary the resolution and the size of the frame buffer for the requirements of particular imaging operations to create very realistic shaded surfaces for 3D modeling. Traditional Gouraud lighting can distort highlights, especially when rendering coarsely tessellated solids. This is the result of calculating the color only at each triangle vertex and then interpolating that color across the triangle. By contrast, specular shading interpolates normals (not colors) and does an interpolation for each pixel. In this way, specular shading provides a more accurate representation of the curvature of surfaces, improving the viewer's ultimate understanding of the model.

The unsurpassed crossbar switch design of Octane2 provides excellent levels of interactivity with critical data transfers, such as loading a 3D model from memory to the screen or processing high-definition video images in realtime. The 1.0GB-per-second peak main memory bandwidth and 1.6GB-per-second peak bandwidth between subsystems ensure that you experience smooth, fluid operations while completing even the most complex tasks. The Octane2 workstation’s 8GB memory capacity gives you increased power to handle bigger data sets for more accurate analysis in less time.

Choose Octane2 for Versatility and Interoperability
Octane2 is built on IRIX®, the advanced, high-performance 64-bit operating system from SGI, and is complemented by the industry's most comprehensive selection of software tools and applications. Octane2 combines IRIX digital media capabilities, and a full complement of interoperability, connectivity, and system administration tools. This allows broad application utilization and convenient integration into heterogeneous environments. The versatility and interoperability that characterize Octane2 translate directly into time and cost savings.

Choose Octane2 for Long-term Value
When you purchase an Octane2 system, your investment becomes a long-term asset. Scalable components let you easily upgrade your system as your computational and application requirements grow.
For example, customers can easily upgrade to higher processors, more memory, and new graphics. An evolution of proven technology, Octane2 offers the stability and reliability required in demanding real-world applications. Octane2 is designed with future product enhancements in mind, ensuring that you can take advantage of ongoing visualization and performance advancements from SGI.

Switching Away from Tradition
The Octane2 system incorporates the crossbar switch in place of a traditional shared bus. The crossbar can dynamically and directly link any two computer subsystems, giving them a high-speed path without interfering or competing with other system activity. Once established, a link provides two-way 1.6GB-per-second peak throughput, and no amount of other system traffic can take away from that reserved bandwidth. This unique design scheme results in a system with extremely high bandwidth and very low latency for guaranteed application performance.

Dual Processors for Double the Power
With an architecture optimized for the advanced features of the MIPS® R14000A^TM processor, the Octane2 compute engine can unleash the complete power of one or two R14000A processors to accelerate real-world application software. The symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) architecture gives users the choice of how to apply the power: use two to quickly solve one task or to simultaneously solve two previously separate problems such as engineering design and analysis.

Flexible Configurations
The Octane2 architecture expands and scales as your needs grow. Users can start with an entry-level single-processor Octane2 V6 system and later add more memory and upgrade the graphics and processors. Octane2 also offers industry-leading flexibility with innovative display and peripheral options. For example, the Dual Channel Display option provides cost-effective dual monitor capabilities for efficient workspace management with a single V12 graphics board. Users can also choose the Dual Head option with two high-performance VPro graphics boards to drive two independent, stereo-capable displays. The V12 Dual Head and Dual Channel Display options can be combined to drive up to four monodisplays or a single large display. With the new PowerDuo configuration, you can even upgrade a single system to accommodate two users on the same dual-processor system.

Industry-Standard Options
For external connections, the Octane2 system gives you the best of two worlds—leading performance and compatibility with the most popular industry standards. Two Ultra SCSI channels provide 40MB-per-second interfaces for optimized data transfers to and from internal or external hard disks, floppies, CD-ROMs, and tape drives. All Octane2 products also support the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) expansion bus at 266MB per second, giving you access to a wide range of network and I/O adapters.

Interoperability
In today's complex computing environment, where networks can involve PCs and Apple™ Macintosh™ systems alongside Unix workstations, Octane2 has the solution to fit into your network. The Octane2 system integrates seamlessly into existing network environments such as Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, ATM, and FDDI. With a variety of software products, Octane2 provides the right tools to enhance your workflow in a multi-OS environment.