On Tuesday, I went to the London launch of Silicon Graphics' new family of visual workstations. The first two products are the Silicon Graphics 320 and the Silicon Graphics 540, both based on Intel processors and the Windows NT operating system. The UK entry level price is only 2340 pounds sterling (which is less than I just paid for my IBM ThinkPad!) and the graphics are stunning. The 540 (from 4130 pounds) has integrated media, including uncompressed, professional digital video. The buzzword of the meeting was "breakthrough" - breakthrough in innovation, price-performance, market placing, changing the competitive landscape etc. etc. SGI moves into the NT marketplace with completely compatible technology but with a difference, the Integrated Visual Computing Architecture (IVC). The graphics are incorporated into the Cobalt chipset and the raw performance is six times greater than AGP and more than 3 times greater than the upcoming AGP2. And if don't need fancy graphics, bear in mind that even the disc performance is impressive for that price range. It even looks pretty (for you iMAC fans!). And in case you're into UNIX, it was pointed out that there is interoperability with UNIX. Was there a downside to the meeting? Well, unfortunately it was squarely aimed at the manufacturing and media marketplaces and my only soul-mate there was Rob Scoffin from CambridgeSoft, doing his ChemOffice demos. Perhaps you guys (and gals) with your high end molecular modelling hardware may not feel the impact of this hardware yet but I suggest you take a look. Wendy -- Dr Wendy A Warr Wendy Warr & Associates, 6 Berwick Court Holmes Chapel, Cheshire CW4 7HZ, England Tel/fax +44 (0)1477 533837 wendy@warr.com http://www.warr.com chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)