SGI Visual Workstation
The Visual Workstation was a workstation for professional graphics development published by SGI in 1999 . The Visual Workstation was based on a commercially available Intel processor ( Pentium II or Pentium III ), but retained the graphic firmware used on other SGI systems and did not use a BIOS ; the hardware components also corresponded to those of other SGI workstations.
The Visual Workstation was sold for a starting price of $ 3395 and should compete with commercially available x86 PCs at the lower end of the performance spectrum. The product was considered a failure and was discontinued shortly after its release.
There were two versions, the Visual Workstation 320 with two Slot 1 processor slots and the Visual Workstation 540 with four Slot 2 processor slots. The other specifications were the same for both systems (128 MB RAM can be upgraded to 1 GB, SGI Cobalt graphics processor, QLogic 1080/1280 SCSI host controller, connections for composite video / S-Video , FireWire , USB, Ethernet, parallel / serial , Audio).
Windows NT 4.0 Workstation was preinstalled as the operating system and could be upgraded to Windows 2000 . Due to the architecture of the Visual Workstation, a specially adapted HAL was necessary. Linux supported the visual workstation until 2014.