Get ready for the attack of the video workstation-that rapidly emerging category of professional computer that is used to create content for Hollywood films and for television. (Or, as I like to put it: Finally, a desktop computer that's good for something.)

The players to watch are Silicon Graphics Inc. and Intergraph Corp. Both will cut a high profile at this week's Siggraph conference in Orlando, Fla., and both will have significant new products in tow.

What's not generally acknowledged is that the two companies also have a big part of their futures at stake.

Consider SGI, which practically invented the graphics workstation. Plagued by a fiscal downturn, SGI last winter pared its work force and said goodbye to longtime chairman Ed McCracken.

New chief executive Rick Belluzzo, brought in from Hewlett-Packard, is turning the company away from the engineering-driven roots that produced peerless products into a lean corporate machine intent on fighting it out in a cutthroat commodity marketplace.

Belluzzo unleashed his strategy in April with the surprising news that SGI would move its workstations and servers away from its homegrown MIPS RISC microprocessors and toward future offerings equipped with Intel's chips.

The first fruits of that plan will be on hand at Siggraph, where SGI will provide a behind-the-scenes preview of a video workstation built around Intel's new Xeon processor. In a move that sources say raised internal temperatures, the computer was designed by a team of engineers who had previously worked at Compaq and other PC firms.

SGI's Intel box will fit in at the low end of its product line and, for the near term, the company will pursue a dual-platform strategy of both Intel- and MIPS-based systems. But as Intel's Merced dawns with the millennium, SGI's MIPS workstations will begin to fade into the sunset.

Though still at the head of the video-workstation pack, SGI will have to fend off a frontal assault from Intergraph. Consider the fighting words Intergraph's promo uses to tout the advanced 3-D graphics technology it will roll out at Siggraph: "This new graphics performance encroaches even further into the once SGI-dominated digital-media environment."

Intergraph, however, is not without its distractions.It has been embroiled in a nasty legal battle with Intel since last fall.

Such problems aside, both SGI and Intergraph say they're in the video-workstation market for keeps. It seems even engineers can't resist Hollywood's allure. As Intergraph chairman Jim Meadlock puts it, "That's where the glamour is."