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SGI's New Linux Boxes
An anonymous reader noted that SGI has announced their latest Linux Workstation. It ships with the new VPro graphics board... you can also look at some specific configurations for the boxes. As always, it's SGI so it's priced in the stratosphere, but at least it's purple and oh-so-lustworthy.
Does anyone know how many fps in quake3?
(could... not... resist... posting...)
Are you a Linux open source hacker, programming for fun and no profit? Do you stay two generations behind in CPUs to max your price/performance ratio? Have you NEVER bought a complete system? Then they are overpriced.
Are you in the IT department of some Fortune 1000 company, or perhaps a developer of a graphically intensive application and are toying with the idea of a Linux port? Do most of your systems cost more than $3000 anyway, and do you buy many every year? Not overpriced.
They're not for me, as my franken-athlon is performing quite nicely. And a PC Power and Cooling case is good enough. And there are sexier cases out there if I cared enough.
I've looked at various commodity color case offerings, and they all looked cheap and not very well designed. Sure, they're funny looking, but they don't have the impressive high-end, quality aspect that SGIs, Macs or even Sun boxen have. They really look like cheap .tw plastic. (No offense to *.tw ... but you see what I mean)
Chris DiBona VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
Yeah, the used market is much more reasonable. And don't worry - I _like_ sgis. I even kind of like Irix most of the time. But the fact is, buying any decent machine new from SGI is going to be expensive. They're still well worth the price.
Yes.
You are missing a bit.
You are correct that there is 3d acceleration in linux. Matrox G200/400. Voodoo3 and to a lesser degree, nvidia. There is one pro card out there from Evans & Sutherland, but it is $500. The Matrox drivers are somewhat fast, but not mature at all. The V3 drivers were, until now, the most mature, and work flawlessly with Xfree4 DRI. They do not do 32bit rendering.
The 230 has flawless and very fast 3d acceleration.
The 230 is a supported platform.
Did I mention how fast the 3d is?
You must realize that you cannot expect to pay for only the hardware on this system. It has been optimized and has incredible software to go with it. I, personally, have waited patiently for this day, and am now saving up to buy one of these.
SGI does not have the legal option of releasing the driver source for these boards.
Hey zico, you know that the VA/Andover merger isn't final until the SEC approves it right? After that you are free to spin conspiracies
Awww c'mon, Chris, you know I'm gonna hafta call you on that one. Since when did actual lack of company ownership ever keep a loyal Slashdotter from spinning conspiracy theories between Microsoft and just about any other company out there? You gotta gimme something better to work with to quell this particular conspiracy yarn. ;-)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
You are mistaken. A kernel built with VisWS support will not run on normal systems, and vice versa. Yes, the patches were integrated, but using them is a compile-time decision.
I actually had the privilages of playing with one of the 230s while SGI was giving the spiel to my lab. Heres what I noticed: 1. The graphics in these things is incredible, I'm not talking TNT2, consumer quality BS, but really good stuff. It quite honestly, almost measured up to the onyx/ reality engine 2 we have in our lab. It lacks a little in the texture ram area. 2. The CPU is x86, it cannot possibly compare with higher end MIPS cpus, end of story. If you want to render something, point yourself towards an iris 3. Good deal, seriously, these things are 50 times better than any non-sgi PC on the market. Good deal.
-f
Could SGI make some money by selling the pretty cases? I've got a Celery 300 and a P133, both of which are fast enough for programming. But they are in ugly boxes! I'd pay a good chunk of change for an SGI box that my boards would fit in.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
How can you say this is over priced?
It's a high end PC with fast PIII 128 MB RAM and GeForce graphics with AGP 4X + very high quality drivers and support. You can't get a better Linux system for significantly less.
It looks blue & gray to me, not purple, (just incase you buy one for the color and are disappointed.
The graphics chipsets are just tuned nVidia Geforce, Quadro, and Geforce 2 boards, which is what SGI told everyone at SGI Linux University. Uses closed source drivers, jointly developed with nVidia.
They also said that some special tweaks would be put on their boards so that they would run faster than generic cards with identical drivers. Other than a mild overclocking (to get the higher fill rate listed), I don't see any way they could do this than to minorly cripple the drivers for boards that don't have official SGI roms.
That said, it's nice to see SGI making progress towards high quality 3D on Linux - I just wish they weren't following the propreitary lead of nvidia.
The workstation family will be priced from $2,725 (U.S. List). The Silicon Graphics 230 is shipping now, the Silicon Graphics 330 and the Silicon Graphics 550 are expected to ship later this quarter. For additional information on specific configurations, please go to http://www.sgi.com/workstations/index.html"
They're using the Steve Jobs model of Supply and demand.
tcd004
Here's my Microsoft parody,, where's yours?
SGI was around when it was fashionable to own your own OS. Then they switched to Unix and are one of the few survivors from that war.
When Unix started to fall they saw it as a Windows NT world in the making and began to turn that way. However 1/2 way through the transition they realized NT had already peaked and was on it's way down. So they are taking up Linux.
If BEOS shows some signs of being "the next big thing" they will adopt that too.
Some people see this as being indecisive. I see it as flowing the money and the customer who spends it. Only companies that do that have long term viability. Just ask IBM how they made it through the last 100+ years to the point where I haven't seen a new IBM typewriter in years. ( Once opon a time that was *the* IBM business )
Sun on the other hand shows no singes of being able to outlive Solaris and no OS is forever. Sure unix has been with us for 30 years but who uses AT&T Unix still ?
Ohh.. BTW. The boixes listed on the "Configurations link" above are kinda sweat but not the real kickass workstations yet. ( SMP ? Where are you ? )
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
That doesn't mean the technology is better, just that it's more marketable. An Onyx2 with eight CPUs and an infinite reality engine is more powerful, by any standard, than anything that has ever existed containing an x86 CPU. And that's a low-end SGI. Nothing that runs Red Hat, except possibly a Sun Enterprise 10000, can even come close to an Origin 2000.
The peecee sucks. It may be easy to market, but it still sucks.
The first-generation systems failed precisely because they had those characteristics. SGI was trying to sell a designed peecee. You can't do it. The whole point of the peecee is that it's just like everyone else's. Either you sell a peecee or you sell a workstation. SGI's come to their senses and decided to sell peecees. Sure, the first-generation systems were better; they were also a failure. Those systems were different. These are just blue peecees.
I'll deal with the Intel/Linux comments first, I don't think you understand the factors involved in SGI's circumstances. To say Intel smoked SGI shows a profound ignorance, or at best trivialization of events. On the Linux issue, SGI would be in a much worse position without Linux. Linux is not a nail in SGI's coffin. It is infact the reverse. Linux is the last hope for the technical community to have a decent functional operating system and for SGI it represents a viable alternative which in future might scale to support architectures like the Origin and meet it's customers needs.
SGI is at least making a contribution to Linux Open Source, not just riding the wave. SGI's commitment to Linux is not new, this is just the first graphics machine and SGI has been doing a lot of work getting it right, not just slapping a few boards together and using whatever software they can download from the OS community.
Knowing a fair old bit about graphics I can tell you that your PC won't smoke an Onyx2, and certainly not by 50X. Maybe some day, but not yet, you can't get near the pixel fill rate with the antialiasing you need to beat an Onyx2.
An Origin2000 has no graphics and the point of that system is it scales well and has memory bandwidth up the wazoo, again you can't get close with a PC.
Maybe some day, but not yet, you can't get near the pixel fill rate with the antialiasing you need to beat an Onyx2.
;)
And a lot (if not most) of that is the video silicon, not the CPUs.. We've got an orphan Onyx with a 4-board RealityEngine2 in the office and it runs 2 MIPS 4400/166MHz CPUs.. IIRC those are the same as the ones in the Cobalt boxes (Qube, RaQ) or at least the same generation..
But the video is obscenely cool.. (when will Mesa get the aquarium screensaver?
Your Working Boy,
...SGI push and promote these linux systems to universities and design/simulation houses with limited budgets. "Enter the world of real computing at a reduced cost!" Provided they sync up the linux and IRIX versions of Performer and other multimedia APIs, it shouldn't be too hard to do cross platform work. The question that keeps going around in my head right now is "upgrade to a high-end O2, maybe a used octane... or take the plunge and go to SGI linux?". I would really like to be able to easily scale up, be able to run my software on the big iron Onyx2 in our HPCC center.
Does SGI have any plans to have a uniform set of desktop and media tools (4dwm, Indigo Magic, toolchest, fm, media convert, etc) between their linux and IRIX distributions in the future? What sorts of cross-platform tools and documentation have they been hinting about? I've been spoiled with IRIX 6.5.X and its well made documenation and simple, yet professional appearance. I hope Insight and other IRIX apps make their way to SGI linux, perhaps to be supported and extended on both ends. Slightly-modified KDE or GNOME won't impress me.
Welcome to a brave new world, SGI. Make us proud.
canderso@ttacs.ttu.edu
If you check the site, the entry-level machine is only about $2800. Sure, it's pricey if you compare it to an eMachines, but for an SGI workstation? Where prices usually go north of $6000? These boxes are a bargain!!
This is part of the new direction SGI has been moving in . . . not only to an open software architecture (Linux) but also to a new level of price-consciousness. Expensive, powerful workstations just don't sell anymore; Nvidia's hardware can make a lowly Dell PC push more pixels than an Octane. So SGI's rolling with that, and is moving toward making the best damn non-outrageously-priced graphics workstations on the market.
Not to mention the coolest-looking };-)
iSKUNK!
I dunno... a cool case and fast graphics card... is that enough of a business plan to keep them afloat in the yet-another-intel-box-running-whatever-OS-you-want market?
We're getting a boatload of these at the uni. I work for. I and another guy get to build a lab out of them in the coming weeks. I'll most likely write a review and submit it when we've got everything ready. Til then...
---- Ryan
If so, then I'd say it's worth the price. Their firmware was nice and had a real understanding of SCSI, could boot off of any drive, and had no stupid 1024 cylinder limit like BIOS systems - like a Sun or Mac.
Could be any number of reasons, such as:
Oh well, those are the reasons that come to mind at first blush. There might be others, but either way, don't count on it ever being reported here, despite the fact that it is a big story to readers here. (Anyone want to try to argue that it's not a huge story to the people who actually visit this site? I'd love to hear it.) Of course, Slashdot will probably say that they're in the business of reporting news, not reporting about Slashdot itself -- shortly before they publish their 8th story about Microsoft lawyers sending letters to Slashdot.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com