Iris. Indigo. Indy. Octane. O2. Crimson. All SGI machines that I had on (or under) my desk back when I used to do real work. They were the best graphics machines money could buy in the day and they are still strong brands today, decades after their introduction. All of which goes a long way to explain why the new SGI has dipped into its brand archive for the positioning of its latest box, the Octane III, announced today. Interestingly, although the machine borrows a name from the past, it is a project that was not under consideration until after the merger. But other than sharing (roughly) the same space under a researcher's desktop, today's Octane has little in common with its namesake from the past. While those systems were graphics demons, today's Octane is really positioned as personal multi-processor compute engine. With up to 80 Nehalem cores, and either GbE or DDR/QDR InfiniBand, the Octane III has the potential to put a lot of power under a researcher's desk. But does it slice the low-end HPC market a little too thin?