The SGI Personal Iris was Introduced in 1988 as an attempt by sgi to start in the budding ‘low end’ graphics workstation market. The Personal Iris was a considerably cheaper version of the earlier 4d/60 - 4d/85 models marketed as ‘RISC superworkstations’ called the Profesional Iris, renamed after the release of the Personal Iris. These systems had developed after their Motorola 68k based IRIS line of workstations and graphics terminals with built in geometry acceleration. The Personal Iris just like its bigger brothers ran on the MIPS RISC CPU architecture running an in-house UNIX os called Irix.
There are 4 versions of the Personal Iris: 4D/20, 4D/25, 4D/30, and 4D/35
| Model | Processor board | CPU |
|---|---|---|
| 4D/20 | IP6 * | R3000 12.5mhz |
| 4D/25 | IP10 ** | R3000 20mhz |
| 4D/30 | IP14 | R3000 30mhz |
| 4D/35 | IP12 | R3000 36mhz |
The 4D/20 and 4D/25 are fairly similar to each other architecturally with the only difference being the IP10 being a 20mhz R3000 instead of the IP6s 12.5 mhz R3000. Though the 4D/3x model has a different memory system using proprietary memory used in the Indigo R3000 systems.
