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Hot New Silicon Graphics Workstations
Jonathan C. Patschke writes: "SGI have finally unveiled their newest-generation visual workstation, the Silicon Graphics Fuel. Features include a MIPS R14k CPU, Vpro graphics, and a PCI bus (finally)." As you would expect from SGI, it looks good,
and the specs are impressive. I only see IRIX listed, but with the
specs on this thing, it may not be slow :)
Can anybody imagine a beowulf custer?
Slashdot, come for the goatse, stay for the trolls.
These boxes look great but everything I read about the new render farms show that people like dreamworks are all switching to large linux render farms and SGI just for front end or no SGI at all and using the new big G4's from apple.
Medical imaging... hmm... shooter games.. medical imaging.. hmm sounds nice.. makes the games more REALISTIC! and probably has enough horsepower to render it in real life color too.. ooh!
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
Like Caligari's trueSpace. What a shame that'd be though, but I couldn't afford any software for this machine, much less the machine itself.
Anyone see a price for it? I couldn't find it, but didn't look too hard.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
From the press release: "The starting configuration for the Silicon Graphics Fuel visual workstation is priced at $11,495 U.S. list, and includes: SGI VPro V10 graphics, 32MB of graphics memory, a 500MHz MIPS R14000A CPU with 2MB L2 cache, and 512MB memory."
(This is about the same prices as a Sun Blade 1000 with 900MHz UltraSparc-III, 8MB Level 2 cache, 1 GB of memory, 36 GB disk and a really crappy 3D-card. But the Blade is not a "visual workstation" though.
Finally, after long dark times, and a very tough re-structuring effort, it seems that SGI is back on the field they lead by far: Big and powerful Unix systems, with the best graphics you can find in the industry. After the strategic zig-zag due to Mr. Belluzio 3-4 years ago("Now we're gonna be an NT vendor!"), it's good to see some big company other than Sun which sticks to the good old, reliable and scalable UNIX systems.
Because, at least, not everyone should sell Windows machines, let Mr. Dell do it.
Just hope support for Linux up to some extent.
DDR ram, wow how about that. 500Mhz 64-bit processor, mmmhmm, how long has the Alpha been out now? And the Power3? Cheezy graphics advances, check...
Ok, ILM and every other CG house on earth is going Linux, maybe some people use Maya and Alias on SGI but god knows, it'll be a cold day in hell when I'd fork out for an SGI as a business expense looking at these specs. And it looks like the big moneymaking CG houses feel the same way.
Nice knowing you, SGI. It was fun while it lasted.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
They removed 2k Support last year. Good riddance. I just wish that they would put more heat toward their Linux support. Their open source web site is at: http://oss.sgi.com/ and http://www.sgi.com/linux/
Bye!
...if only they would bring back my beloved 1600SW, my life would be complete...
Huh. Did anyone else notice that they didn't mention anything about UMA like they hyped up on their O2? I wonder if they ditched UMA for something closer to the rest of the PC world. If so I'm sorry, UMA was a pretty neat idea.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
... that this is a classic case of "Too Little, Too Late."
Which really is too bad.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
A bit pricey for me, but I'll put it on my wish list anyway ;)
Sinepaw.org: Grape Winos
This is great! A new hardware platform to port
BSD to. This would be great for all the clustered
rendering farms that are used in movies.
really! throw as much anime images as you want, IRIX still looks like ass!
SGI are still producing fantastic graphics architectures with next-to-nothing processing power behind them... Sheesh. What are they on ?
:-) but this machine is - to coin a phrase - too little, too late :-(
I work in the video/film post-production business. We are one of their major clientbases, and these machines will go down well in this niche area. Unfortunately, althoguh SGI get a lot of press for their "movie" image, it's not their money-spinner...
SGI get most of their money from government and research contracts. This machine will not cut the mustard in those areas - it's just too damn slow. Yes the CPU is probably a better performer than its Intel equivalent in MHz, but I just don't believe it'll get anywhere near the SPECfp and SPECint of the Athlon 2000 or Intel 2.2GHz CPUs.
It's a shame. I *really* like SGI machines. I've bought several (I donated one of them to libsdl just so SDL would support SGIs
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
We now return you to hopefully more useful discussion...
Hmm. funny that they never seem to list the prices of these things close to the description page.
If I have to ask how much it costs, does that mean I can't afford it?
Is it like our Sun machines, where to gauge the price of components, I just add a zero to my linux box?
Imagine
John Lennon
Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religon too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...
Imagine no possesions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
In a brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
You may say i'm a dreamer
But i'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Good to see that SGI is still retaining some idea of what makes them great - I look at my little Indy, and when it was built, and wonder what would have happened if they had kept it up.
OT - does anybody know of a Irix UG near Wichita, KS?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Disclaimer. I spent the last three years working daily on an SGI Octane. I loved it and turned down several offers to "upgrade" to a Windows based system that in real terms was faster. SGI makes excellent systems which are by and large great to work with.
This new system looks great but unless I was trapped by some particular piece of software I still could never cost justify buying one. $12000+? Sorry. Even presuming that the real world performance is significantly ahead of a high end Pentium system (which I doubt) it's still more expensive, especially once you factor in the service contracts. Those will add several thousand a year. Not to mention that a "well equiped" version will cost much more in all likelyhood.
SGI makes great machines but as a business they are in a teeny-tiny little market niche that is being eroded far too quickly by commodity hardware. They manage to keep ahead for the super high end stuff but that never leaves much room to grow. Frankly I'm mildly astonished the company is doing as well as it is.
I'd love to play around with one of these new Fuel systems but I doubt I'll ever have the chance. There just are too few cases where anyone could justify buying one. Sad really...
977 BTU/hour is that a lot for a modern computer?
What is the average Intel based system heat dissipation rate?
What about a PPC based machine?
These days I'm looking for powerfull yet quiet/cool running machines.
This is probably not that important in a workstation of this type, but it would still be nice.
-M
I'm not about to enter the SGI vs. Linux vs. Mac debate; look no further than the company's own stock price. Back in September the stock hit a low of $0.31 per share, though it has made impressive gains in recent months due to potential government contracts.
Even in the great technology spending spree of the late 1990's SGI languished far behind everyone else. The company has lost money each quarter since at least 1999, the company is expected to show a net loss for the fiscal year ending in June, and the June 03 year is expected to be breakeven at best. Currently only four analysts follow the stock; jokes about the usefulness of analysts aside, 3 have it rated a hold and 1 has an outright sell.
How much longer will SGI survive. The technology is great, but can they pay the bills?
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
SGI has always had incredible design sensibility. I like the logic of "If you pay a crapload of money for a workstation, it should look really cool". Outside of Apple, SGI is the only company that has a computer that people LOOK at and think "I want THAT on my desk".
And of course the speed and power don't hurt...
this is getting old and so are you
blog
I wonder why they went with 10k RPM drives, when 15k RPM drives are readily available and in use today. Working with large graphics, animations, etc it seems like there would be alot of saving and reading from the disk, enough that it would be worth it. Also, it says it has space for up to three drives, but doesn't mention any sort of hardware-based RAID feature.
I Heart Sorting Networks
Does anyone else think that sgi's workstations look like refrigerators from the late 50's early 60's? Or is it just me?
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
Single MIPS® 64-bit R14000A processor, 500 MHz with 2MB L2 cache or 600 MHz with 4MB L2 cache; 200 MHz front-side bus
OMG! Like, for real? Only 600 Mhz max? What kind of slack ass company makes a computer that slow these days? These people are totally lame! {/SARCASM}
Sorry for the trolling guys, hopefully some of you find it funny. I just thought I'd do my impersonation of 75% of the readers when they evaluate Macintosh specs. Anyway, happy modding!
~ now you know
It looks like SGI is going to give a Fuel workstation away on Feb 27th to... someone that actually deserves one! Check out the "IRIX Innovation Zone"
http://www.sgievents.com/developer2002/
Time to dig out some old, fun OpenGL code... and maybe gcc too (http://freeware.sgi.com)
Because Mac's aren't near as powerful, Duh! This isn't a mac flame, but Macs just don't have a machine that can compete with a R14k, and probably not even a r12000a. I think you're all just upset because SGI's look cooler than macs.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
They've been relying on the same basic machine for like 5 years now.
The color is kinda weird. Reminds me of the old Crimson Reality systems they used to sell.
I thought I read somewhere that they had dumped that piece of crap IRIX and all their new machines would run Linux? I know that they haven't even got X working on the Indigo yet but I assumed they would be using different new excitng processors or something. It's certainly a different world with professional unix workstations- the processors evolve much more slowly than the pc market.
graspee
Or a G4 1GHZ DP, with 1.5GB RAM, 2x2MB DDR Cache, 3x72GB Ultra160 SCSI and a 22" Flat panel, oh, and another $2500 to buy a real Video Card. The Apple will conveniently run those wonderfull Alias Apps too. I suspect a G4 1GHz DP will out perform a Blade 1000, let alone that MIPS R14KA@500MHz.
The Crazy Finn
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
I only see IRIX listed
That's becuase this is their latest MIPS system, not some x86 box. Despite some progress, Linux does not really run on SGI MIPS boxes. And some of us like IRIX just fine, thank you :-)
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
While SGI loves the publicity and credit that go along with their sales to the movie/special effects industry, those are not the sales that keep the company going.
The visual workstation is a lovely thing. I wouldn't trade my O2 for anything other than a newer one, but it's just not where their power lies. The big servers are their strength. Government and research contracts use the huge, scalable systems for their varied, power-hungry, graphics intensive applications. That's a market they do well in, and I'm glad they've finally come back to the point where they might be a viable company again. It would be incredibly sad if they ceased to exist.
Yes, I used to work for them.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
How scalable is SGI's architecture compared to, say, a renderfarm running over Sun's Grid engine on Linux? This always needs to be factored into cost analysis, doesn't it?
239 cju lfztqbdf- nz qbttxpse jt ubdptopu.
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Lest I remind everyone about the Mips archictecture. Back when the Iris Indigo came out with a 33 Mhz R3000 it was roughly the integer performance of a 486DX2/66 with 12x the FP power.
And now on to the Mac.
Don't forget, the Macintosh has yet to have a workstation class video card in it. I've seen lots of Geforces, but never a Quadro series. That doesn't make sense to me unless they are not planning on any rendering. So why use a Mac for 3D?
http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/01_25_02_revised_0 12802_vreeland.html
You are right on with that one. It's really pretty freaky. Maybe they should sell desks with a yellow-flower-print-wallpaper type look to match the computer case...
~ now you know
The machine is nice, SGI makes a fine product, and with renewed violence on the part of the US military they have some chance of being solvent again in the near future. So relax, enjoy looking at a beautiful product you will never be able to afford, and don't be so jealous.
Too bad there won't be a manufacturer left in a year to support the thing!!!!!!
SGI Isn't doomed.
There has been great discussion within the "SGI camp" about SGI's abandonment of MIPS and adoptions of x86; many people being disheartened by this. With the new release of this machine, I think it will make many people take a second glance at SGI before choosing an x86-based Linux farm.
Why do people choose SGI? Because with SGI you get a workstation that was designed for Unix; a real Unix workstation. It's an all in one package-- hardware, software, support. It's not some Linux-based kludge.
Look at Apple -- they are nearly identically copying the SGI business model with the release of OSX: an all-encompassing unix workstation solution targetted towards content creation.
While I only own a few less powerful R4400s and R4600s, I believe the R10000 based SGI machines (Purple Indigo2s) are 64 bit... and those were released 8 or 10 years ago-- making moot of your last point. Plus, anyone with any hardware experience outside the x86 realm will note that you are falling into the 'megahertz myth.' Alphas are great and all, but they are being phased out, even though megahertz-per-megahertz they are probably 2x-3x faster than x86 processors.
Welcome back into the ring, SGI
SGI has been slowly collapsing like flan on a cupboard for the past 6 years. They haven't achieved much other than injecting their necrotic agent into once-successful companies like Cray, MIPS and others they have absorbed throughout the years. They are overly-diversified and unfocused, which a pathetic excuse for a new workstation won't help.
I will not let SGI sit on their laurels. They will have to prove to me that it is worth 4x money for the applications that me and my clients run.
I have one scientist I support. I told him that the p4 was some hot computing (in more ways than one). He put his app on it. His $5k linux machine (dual p4) outran his dual R10k (might have been 12k, can't remember) but 4x. Some might say "Well, ya...that's such an old box". I'll say that it has to last longer because it cost $60k! Not to mention the memory upgrade prices.
There comes a point with the hardware were it is cheaper to get a programmer to optimize your app for a linux machine, or to buy a compiler that can fake out your 32 bit box into doign 64 bit-ish instructions.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE
Sure as hell did, that is no misstatement, GF4 is a reality.
Dual G4 is probably competitive processor wise and definitely is a better buy. The GeForce 4 is not going to cut it against the pro graphics subsystems. Just a side note, anything using Altivec on one of these bad boys is the fastest you can possibly get. If you can treat your code as vector quantities the G4 simply smokes anything else. I mean if parts of maya were optimized for the G4 I would expect the G4 to outperform these other systems.
A faster Mac? Please.
This thing looks to have the same terrifying memory bandwidth as its
big brother, the Octane2. 3.2GBps. On a dedicated port crossbar.
The Mac is STILL struggling along with PC133 SDRAM. And the Mac has a
"Geforce4MX", which is basically a faster GF2MX, not a fourth
generation part. Compare that to the SGI graphics subsystem for a
laugh.
For processor bound tasks, yes, the 7455 G4 will be faster than the
R14k, but for overall system performance, ESPECIALLY when pushing big
models around, you'd be goofy stupid to try and use a Mac if you could
afford one of these babies (to say nothing of the Octane2).
Peace,
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Alot of animators have switched to win2000 based workstations with maya and the like, and linux based render farms. The workstations are alot cheaper and perform better than the sgi equivelants, and the render farms are MUCH MUCH cheaper than sgi's equivelant massive multi-cpu workhorse systems.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
The new Fuel is only part of what they just announced. The Visual Area Networking/VizServer stuff looks pretty spiff too.
This shall be known as the Alan Thicke paradox. How is it possible that Alan Thicke is dead yet he is posting on Slashdot? Sounds like a 2Pac thing to me.
I think it's getting to be evident that the traditional UNIX RISC workstation vendors are having a hard time keeping their CPUs not only on the price/performance curve, but on the performance curve itself.
The MIPS chip is battling uphill, just like the UltraSPARC III against competitive offerings like the 2.2 GHz Northwood P4 and the AMD Athlon XP 2000.
I respect SGI for it's history of graphics expertise and devotion to producing quality hardware, but like many others I have to ask the hard question:
For some people, it probably is worth the extra money. But I think that target market is constantly shrinking.SGI has hemorrhaged some good people, money, and their 3D patent portfolio (to MS recently). They can ill afford to come up with any product less than a perfect bullseye at this stage of the game. I fear this is not it.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Guys.....GUYS... listen: the MIPS chips are *not even close* to the same architecture as PowerPC or Intel/AMD.
The R14000 clock rates are expected to go up shortly, and at 500MHz the theoretical peak performance is 1 GigaFlop per second. They are much - much nicer chips than the mutts we run today.
I'm a 2000 man.
I guess that depends what you use it for. 8MB Level2 cache is quite much, and you can get the Blade 1000 as a dual-processor machine too. Serving multiple users (with remote logins (and maybe X) is probably faster on the Sun-machine).
Since this is a workstation, it's primary usage in the post production industry would be as a modeling or editing station, like the Octane/Octane2. Actually, looking at the specs, this looks like an "Octane lite." Note that in the expansion section they do not mention available XIO slots, so no HD (snowball) cards for this puppy. As for the lack of UMA mentioned by another poster, UMA was only ever available on the O2 and x86 visual workstations. Using the system memory for texture is good for CAD applications, but not so good for the real time manipulation of textures needed by Maya or Discreet's compositing applications. Note that the stock graphics are VPro V10 - pretty badass. Personally, I have a V6 in My Octane2. In short, this is an R14k single proc Octane, with no XIO, not too sure about the backplane, as there do not seem to be any fuel related docs up on techpubs yet. For 1/2 the price of an Octane2, this seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Now, as for the clock cycles. Please. Hasn't the recent AMD vs intel clock cycle mess taught you people anything? Clock Cycles !=speed. I mean really, this is not a box to play quake on. This is a box to design quake on. =)
Finally, on a personal note, I think it's pretty amusing that they have returned to the Crimson color scheme.
Good work all around lads, glad to see that there are still enough good people at sgi to get this kind of box out the door. I think that this box is a good mid range system, right between the O2 and the Octane.
Am I the only one who thinks a 600mhz CPU w/4mb of L2 cache can smoke a 1+ghz x86/POW whatever w/32/128k of cache? And it really does 64bits, not just considers it, yippy! If any body read the article these are for front-end workstations, NOT render farms. Yes the big guns in hollywood use Linux for render farms, but the workstations are still SGI. Why, becuase PC's still suck at COMPLEX 3D. They are getting better, but they are still ghugging on stuff an SGI whips through (higher data throughput and bus speed mean A LOT!) Besides, why would you spend 10 grand on a high-end graphics station and use it for a render farm? You'd never use the graphics capabilities in a render farm, that's 100% CPU crunching. You gotta love those HUGE mips CPU's. You could make a really cool toaster(for bread not video) with a couple R5000's stuck side by side! Thank god SGI stopped making those stupid NT boxes with the reversed PCI slots and custom memory! Let's hope they didn't integrate the graphics on the Mboard this time. A company I worked for actually bought a bunch of SGI 320's in '99. And when the company went bust 10 months later, we all got $5,000 unupgradable paper weights as a consolation prize.
Silly troll, IRIX is for work! (Not customizing the desktop every which way).
. ht ml
s /s creen03_full.jpg
Of course, there is GNOME (http://freeware.sgi.com).
And IRIX *apps* don't look too shabby...
http://www.ifx.com/pages/piranha/screenshot/dx2
http://www.electronicfarm.com/mule/screen_image
Since I hunted for it and couldnt find it..it MUST be expensive
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
It will be interesting to see if the nascent GeForce4 chip will perform well in the benchmarks. From the specs of the card, it looks like it's following in GF2 and 3's footsteps: a phoenomenal game-rendering architecture that does poorly with CAD/professional CG, but still better than any other gaming card on the market...
I just bought an old Indigo2 with a 250MHZ R4400 MIPS CPU with 160MB MEM , 2 SCSI-2 Disks and a High Impact Video Card.
;P
And yes it runs IRIX 6.2 and i am playing with Blender on it and it runs like an charm.
I Compiled this box out of 3 Indigo2's and took
the best parts and i dont really think its slow for the time it was created and i even think IRIX is pretty oke in speed running X, Netscape even starts faster then on my Linux box which is a AMDK62/550 with 256MB MEM and IDE Disks. (starts in about 5 seconds on my SGI. Prolly the SCSI disks being faster here though)
But i love the 20" screen
Quazion.
Also: Athlon and Pentium 4 block diagrams for comparison. That P4 is one ugly S.O.B....
I'm a 2000 man.
A DP Blade will out perform the G4, no argument there. The 8Mb will make a difference, and a big one, for large data sets. As to serving remote users, I'd bet on the Mac, due to having a faster NIC in it stock, at least in comparable cost configs (The Blade will scale higher)
The Crazy Finn
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
PCI has been available for Octanes and O2s for quite some time - externally. And they've had a better bus for everything integrated for quite some time too. All you get, in terms of PCI, with this system is an internal card cage.
--Matthew
It's too bad they don't have a processor like this MIPS-based processor. 600MHz is pretty slow, even for MIPS.
Apparently the above processor is becomming popular for areas other than networking, its intended market.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
what's the difference?
:)
i cant't seem to find any technical descriptions, all i saw is this:
"SGI offers a choice of the greatest visual realism in the world with SGI? InfiniteReality3TM graphics subsystem and the highest interactive graphics performance with the new InfinitePerformance graphics subsystem."
... and oh eah, how is it better then my 80mill tri/sec PS2
Even funnier is that SGI often gives deals to companies in return for never saying they use anything BUT sgis. It's marketing, advertising and a little fib to make it look like companies use nothing but SGI, especially in a "making of.." show.
First of all, the Fuel workstation is sort of a cool new evolution... it uses the existing V10 and V12 graphics from Octane2, and the chipset from a single Origin 3000 node. This means instant software compatibility and one hell of an awesome base to run future graphics and CPU offerings. Compared to a single CPU Octane2... Fuel has *half* the latency, *3.2x* the RAM thruput, and *twice* the CPU interconnect thruput. And it run the same OS and the same apps. All for about 1/3 to about 1/2 the price. Sounds like a pretty resonable update to me. And an Octane2 ain't too shabby for real-time interactive apps, either. If you haven't already, find one to play with. A VPro-based Octane running IRIX 6.5.12 or newer is a 3D beast, and yet rock solid stable. Even makes for one hell of an uncompressed, realtime HD video solution, if you can afford the RAID and HD interface. I've never seen a PC or Mac HD solution come even close to Octane2. And Fuel is that much better...
/ 3000/ip/tech_info.html.
Folks run IRIX for HD video editing, effects compositing, and 3D modeling for a reason -- it works and it doesn't have the "crap out" effect when working under a huge load. Sure the CPUs in an SGI aren't extremely powerful, but that doesn't matter much -- it's the crossbar switch architecture (Octane/Octane2 is based on Origin 2000, Fuel is based on Origin 3000) and wide busses that make the difference. Batch jobs and long haul rendering is all done on a farm of cheap PC's anyway (unless you're ILM, which owns six Origin 2000s, each with 128 CPUs).
Secondly, SGI is coming up with some way cool graphics offerings. In my opinion, the new Onyx InfinitePerformance graphics is bigger news than the new workstation:http://www.sgi.com/visualization/onyx
SGI screwed up big time in the past, but they're working on fixing the situation. They can't do everything at once, but they're working as hard as they can. They're a pretty wide spread company. Hell, they even own Alias-Wavefront (ever heard of Maya?). They're doing some other cool things, too. Their developer program is now free to commercial developers, but hobbyists with a real project are invited as well in a case-by-case basis. They're even giving away a Fuel workstation at the SGI Global Developer Conference next month. And it's not just a drawing, either. The winner of the machine will be a hobbyist with an attendee-voted best project. Very, very cool stuff.
http://www.sgi.com/developers
http://www.sgievents.com/developer2002/
DUH
Am I going to have to be the first one here to make the Obligatory Quake Refference? Okay then.
Ahem...LoOkz ShWeET, HoW faST DoES it RUn QUaKE 3? Woot!!
Thanks alot, I'm going to go take a shower now.
One thing that immediately struck me when browsing the tech specs, was that the only mention of audio was this:
Digital Audio Through USB ports
Now, I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with this, but SGI workstations are known for their great audio capabilities. Even the humble O2 has 8-channel 24-bit ADAT optical audio I/O; that's quite something! It seems SGI has decided that this level of audio support is no longer desired, though... Too bad. I'm not sure if USB can be pushed to support this; at 48kHz sampling rate, 8 channels of 24-bit audio requires a minimum of 9 Mbps of bandwidth, which is less than the 12 Mbps theoretical maximum. *Shrug*. Of course, there's PCI slots, but having it integrated was very convenient. And cool, too.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Imagine a Beowolf...!!!
sigh, it's not easy being Troll.
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden
Something I really miss from SGI's tech spec listings nowadays are the exact capabilities. I remember the good old days when Infinite Reality came out, and they listed maximum hardware supported antialiasing(8x8 at the time, 4x4 being default). *Sighs*
Other readers claim that this machine is "too slow" compared to current technical capabilities. This may be due to the fact that in the 80's, SGI machines were much faster than commodity systems, percentagewise, than they are now. I believe, however, that this SGI machine is just right for science, government, and media, just as SGI claim. My belief is that such organizations have a complete computing environment, so to speak, in the form of a network. Although the enthusiast, such as many Slashdot readers, likes to install fancy shmancy computers on a network for the "power trip", I believe that in a serious workplace environment, every machine on a network has a defined purpose. This SGI workstation fits perfectly in such an environment, where most tasks take place on back-end server machines, leaving the workstation free to process the user's application and display high quality graphics. Besides that, don't forget that SGI's systems offer services and reliability not found on your typical Dell running Windows. Speed isn't the only reason for buying an SGI machine.
Well; that's a deep subject.
Am I the only one who thinks a 600mhz CPU w/4mb of L2 cache can smoke a 1+ghz x86/POW whatever w/32/128k of cache?
Why, yes; apparently. The widely accepted, true benchmark of raw processor performance is the SPEC benchmark suite. Athlon XP1900; which has 64KB on-chip L1 cache and 256KB on-chip L2 cache has a SPECint2000 rating of 677. SGI Origin 300, which has a 500MHz R14000 CPU with 32KB on-chip L1 I-cache and 32KB on-chip L1 D-cache; and 2MB OFF-chip L2 cache has a SPECint2000 rating of 365. The floating point numbers are nor really that different, it is 634 vs. 378 in the FP front. And no, unlike the toy benchmarks in the hardware sites of teenage "experts"; higher numbers are better. Check the numbers for yourself at http://www.spec.org.
The 4MB L2 cache that the SGI machine has is off-chip; and you can see for yourself from the SPECint2000 and SPECfp2000 numbers that the performance improvement does not really help the SGI machine to keep up with x86 boxes.
Granted, the SGI Origin 300 has a 500MHz speed; but unlike they came up with some drastic architecture change between the 500MHz and the 600MHz versions, it is certain that an Athlon XP1900 will handily beat these newfangled SGI boxes in raw performance, and will cost a lot less.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
Um, Octanes had a PCI bus, but you had to buy a card cage. You plug your PCI cards into the cage, then you plug the cage into the Octane.
Anyone see a price for it? I couldn't find it, but didn't look too hard.
If you have to ask...
What I didn't see standing out on the web page was cost. These workstations will cost you anywhere from $13K to $17K, per a briefing I saw on these prior to release. All support dual-monitor (think Matrox G450 style) with 32MB of video memory. The 32MB can be divided how you want so that if you want 16MB of texture memory, you give up resolution, color depth, or Z-buffers, etc.
My customer has gotten tired of ordering $48K Octanes and has been trying to get us to go to high end NT boxes. You don't port your code. You rewrite it. Anyways, when he saw the cost of one of these Fuels, it sits in the same ball park the high end NTs do (think high end SCSI, OpenGL card, lots of memory, etc). These NTs are on a cost level with the Fuel, but the Fuel doesn't break our custom software. Suddenly, the x86 box doesn't look like that great a deal.
The Fuels is NOT a dual processor machine.
Mac OS X is a Unix as well. No "System bombs" there. Now go take your FUD somewhere else.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
They have lowered the bar for entry for many people who could use an Octane, but don't need the higher end options avaliable. This machine combined with their O300 scalable server line and the new VizServer products will open a lot of new doors for SGI. They are working very hard at improving price / performance and it shows in this product as well as their O300 line of machines currently shipping.
For those doing the MHZ thing while bitching about the price, forget it. This is a visual workstation. For those doing modeling, imaging, MCAD, and other graphical tasks, Fuel is hard to beat. There are things that even older IRIX machines do easily that give todays PC the fits. I use them all the time and they are worth what you pay for stability, long life, and capability.
Think of it this way also: You will now be able to get re-maunfactured Octane machines, with very good GFX systems for a lot cheaper in the next coming months. Given the very long life of these machines, that can only be a good thing.
These attributes are what holistic design gives you. Sure the price is higher, but you do get exactly what you pay for... For an example, look at Apple. Say what you want, but they are doing very well while copying what SGI has always done for years. Slowly the 'market' (read: masses) are beginning to figure out that this approach has long term value.
Basically you almost never throw an SGI machine away. When used for one of the specialized tasks they are built for, they continue to be useful long after they should be.
A little off topic, but look at Apple machines and realize that they will be good for making DVDs a long time from now. 5 years from now an older G4 with the DVD drive will still have nice value because it gets the DVD tasks done right. This is how SGI machines have almost always been.
So pay more now, but if the purchase actually reflects the strengths of the machine, you pay a hell of a lot less later.
There is more coming this year I'll bet, it should be an interesting one for SGI!
Blogging because I can...
Or perhaps this post is offtopic, as benchmarks quoted here show that fastest single x86s are faster than R14 already.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
SGI has the same group of people working on both Linux and NT (ie nobody).
Just let me point out that the name of the company is SGI, not Silicon Graphics Inc.
If SGI really wants to dominate a market, they should sell PC cases...I know I'd spend a hell of a lot of money on something that cool-looking.
Other than your idiotic link, you said it.
a
This person has said nothing of importance and
his post gets moderated to 5-intersting.
As someone posted earlier:
duksdfhkasdhfksdfakjhfksdkahdsjhdskhkashdskahsd
[repeated many times]
Hey, this is slashdot, must be an informative
post... sigh.
- Pernguin Kicka
and a PCI bus (finally)
Why you shouldn't be excited about this:
1) PCI *eats balls and ass* compared to XIO.
2) The Octane has an option for a PCI card cage, so this isn't new at all.
hmm. i see some plusses and some minuses... i'd say the real decision-maker is how much the things will cost. does anyone know if sgi has mentioned that part yet?
But that doesn't seem to stop Compaq and HP from "betting their prospective companies" on IA64, even if it is a dog and they've sold about twelve of them last year...
MHz isn't everything (as Mac people can attest), but I would still like to see SGI start making PC video cards and their own Linux.
...or at least buy NVidia.
Here is my take: People are saying SGI is doomed, and that they lag behind in processor speed. They are both right and wrong. Yes, SGI is doomed, unfortunatly. No, they are not slower than their wintel counterparts. Most of the facilities that use these machines roll their own software, and have that software specifically tuned for the MIPS architecture. I am in the visual effects biz for motion pictures, and I use an SGI everyday of my working life. I have had my machine running, without even a crash, not even ONCE, for almost two years. I don't know of any other graphics platform that can claim that. And as slow as Mac OSX makes everything, SGI is totally ahead of them. Linux is the only other comperable solution, and it lacks big time for displaying graphics, and all the calibration tools one in the graphics professionals demands.
wow, I thought I was having fun playing around with my Indigo2 R4400 200MHZ system.. but the damn thing cant even play quake in a small window.. ohh well and I think they should bring back there old logo. I seem to be buying everything off ebay with there logo on it. T-Shirts, USB Keyboards, Indigo2 systems.. like NIKE I just buy it for the logo.. well not really but I like it batter than SGI..
The quality of SGI machines that I have worked with has always been far beyond that of the PeeCee world.
For example, open the case on an Indigo2 R10K Max Impact. Big. Heavy. Well made.
Why did you open the case? Just to look at a lot of very neat engineering.
Open the case on an industry standard PeeCee. Sharp edges. Wires everywhere. Stuff where you can't get to it. Entire thing weighs maybe 10 pounds. 5412 screws, of which 3081 can't be gotten to without removing the others.
Why did you open it? Because A)It was making a really loud sound. B)It needs an upgrade. See the upgrades installed last week inside? Obviously too old. C)It no longer turns on except to make said banging sound.
And the worst thing: You would get REALLY mad at your SGI if it ever did any of the above to you. Do we get mad at our PeeCee's? Hell no. We just call it a sign of the times.
For a company who has a main focus of large-scale parallel processing, I find it funny that they describe their graphics processor as "unparalleled"
("the unparalleled VProTM 3D graphics system for IRIX®")
please in terms MHz the PowerPC is well behind even the under funded MIPS CPU's (they dont care so much about MHz but about integration on the same Die i.e. SOC)
really I dont know why SGI dont use this chip
RM9000x2 its got HYPERTRANSPORT like the AMD chips and the ol SysAD bus and Supports DDR SDRAM
all they have to have is GIMP for IRIX ICC'd and most people would be happy for Bitmap manipulation
lots of render's work under IRIX so thats not a problem
the problem is the back end Farm that now EVERYONE uses Linux for on el'cheapo AMD/Intel box's SGI used to live here and now they got shoved out by Linux
they are doing the right thing extend product range and work on getting Linux on decent hardware so they can sell it to their customers
pity Itanium turned out such a PIG
I just hope SGI are doing their own motherboards (-;
regards
john jones
SPEC FP
from aceshardware:
POWER4 1300MHz 1098
P4 Xeon 2200MHz 779
Alpha 21264C 1000MHz 776
USarcIII 1050MHz 701
Athlon XP 1667MHz 596
MIPS R14000 500MHz 436
Athlon 1400MHz 426
Maybe the R14000A is a bit faster than the R14000.
->
http://www.aceshardware.com/SPECmine/index.jsp?
I purchased a pair of SGIs for the store design department of my former company. The machines themselves were great, and I have no complaints about the prices considering what we were getting. The problem is SGI's resellers - they still use an extremely antiquated distribution technique, where you have to call a reseller, ask for a quote, they get back to you, etc. Or at least they did in 2000 - I hope that that's not the case anymore. There might be a lot more companies willing to buy these things if they could just click on them at warehouse.com and avoid having to deal with jackass salesmen.
Just by raw benchmark scores? Ok, it is useful for the cross platform tests. But practically, I would got for the "how fast will it take to render X job" and X being a job containing common tasks for a large part of the market. Because that is what the consumers, end users, care about for their machines. Apple sells computers to them. That is why Apple uses Photoshop time trials, etc. I doubt anyone would want to sit down and calculate various other ways to benchmark machines (operating systems, also). Apple is selling a complete box, so they use benchmarks that reflect that in most cases. They also use them because they can't (as AMD has found out with the real world processor ratings) just boast MHz to MHz. Hence the MHz Myth page on Apple now.
It is the same argument for SGI machines now, if it helps me get my work done faster, with as little hassle as possible (not having to learn another environment, if the engineering Profs at my college are any sign of typical SGI users, they are smart, and they use computers as tools more than toys) then I like it. My CS advisor wants to get a Dual G4 right now, since she does a lot of work in Maya on her O2 at the school, and having a system to do it at home would be useful. Don't forget that a lot of people just see computers as tools, to get a job done. And if the tool doesn't help the job, they don't use it.
It seems obvious tht most of the people posting here don't have to deal with SGI directly. They have *consistently* gouged their users in the support area ever since they opened. When they were the only shop in town, no-one could stop them. Now - forget it. If you're well-off and buy SGI workstations for a hobby you can ignore this topic, but when you're trying to run a business and they lasso you into positively obscene support contracts, you ask questions. Since support is one of their major profit centres, don't expect an answer.
They're in trouble - most people I know in the FX biz see this as a desperate last hurrah in the post world.
DT
It's only 500MHz! And I thought Macintoshes were slow at their measly 1GHz.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Well, it's not the first time Slashdot misses the point. :-( SGI didn't released just the Fuel workstation today. In fact, that the smallest and most insignificant part of their announcement.
The actual announcement reffers to the so-called Visual Area Networking - a concept that, basically, boils down to distributed visualising and data processing over a network.
With VAN, a user can interact with an InfinitePerformance supercomputer (usually an Onyx 3000 with several hundred processors), let the big iron do the data processing, and receive the resulting images over a network to a thin client. That "thin" client may be a Fuel workstation, a PDA, some device used by US troops to get realtime maps of the enemy positions, whatever.
The point is, many people, working from many different locations, can work together using their thin clients, but manipulating data on the same supercomputer. I've seen some impressive demos, where two people were immersed into the same VR environment, and were manipulating objects on the same scene, at the same time, over the network. Given the fact that the scene was not just a pure graphical computer-games scene, but an actual simulation with real physical laws and everything, that was pretty damn cool.
I tried to submit the actual story, but it was rejected. Instead, Slashdot caught this ridiculous story about "yet another workstation from SGI". Come on people, get real...
Sorry to burst your bubble, but unless your doing high end graphics and/or extremely bandwidth intensive stuff, x86 is MUCH faster.
Why would you buy an SGI if you weren't doing high end graphics work?
SGI's are really fast at what they are designed for, graphics. I use a P4 with an Nvidia card as my desktop system, but when I need access to the framebuffer for some real-time application I ask for one of the SGI's... Even a 2-3 y.o. one beats the best PCI you can buy, mostly because of that bandwidth. Which makes me worry about this machine, why isn't it using 1066 RDRAM? It can't be for cost reasons, I can only imagine they don't have the engineers to do it anymore...
(The compilers aren't THAT bad, buggy and hard to use but the code is faster than gcc code.)
I spent 1999 working as a contractor for SGI. Was there for the launch of their first NT product, which only stayed on the market for a few months. After that debacle, the party line was that it was time to concede the low-end graphics workstation market to companies that specialized in commodity hardware. SGI would concentrate on markets that need a lot of computing power, like the high-end graphics workstation market, where the margins are higher and commodity hardware doesn't cut it.
I don't see any flaw in this strategy. So why have the abandoned it? Did George Lucas throw a snit or something?
Although the color could be better.
...is that, even though they go to such great lengths to distance themselves from the Windows/Intel mentality, they absolutely love comparing their slower hardware to Wintel machines. They describe their newest CPU as "faster-than-light". Give me a fucking break!
At least SGI knows their niche and doesn't bother others with stilted benchmarks.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
another box i can collect for a coupla hundred dollars off ebay in 4-6 years... *looks over at Sun Ultra 10, Alpha 500, and SGI O2 sitting on desk*
Hrmm. I recall John Mashey posting a big paper on the Origin 3000 series when they first were released (~July 2000).
In it he talked about an extra ASIC being thrown in to allow the use of Itanium. There was some speculation the ASIC would have to be re-worked for McKinnly but anyhow...
I also recall the bricks for the MIPS procs having plenty of extra space, it was rumoured the extra space was since Itanium would us the same basic brick and needed a lot more space for cooling or what-not.. anyhow (again)..
Point being, SGI could possibly be considering a Linux version of Fuel since it is basically a single-processor O3000. Perhaps they intend to have an IA-64 version w/ a special version of Linux on it. That'd be awfully neat IMO... not sure if it's a great business plan but it occurred to me it seems technical feasible and likely already in somebody's mind at SGI. -Pl
That last part takes very little human intervention. Pretty much nothing more than put the image onto the points that the human mapped out, while on the real hardware.
The Linux Render Farms are just that. Render Farms. It is akin to a farmer planting his seeds into the soil. The soil lets the plants grow. The Render Farm simply lets the scenes grow.
Get a clue, you x86 32-bit ninny.
--
.sig seperator
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
MIPS plus DDR... Ahhhh. :)
Sheeeit....IRIX is for rooting. I lost count of how many IRIC
I have one too, also with the "oldschool" logo. I also have a Multilink adapter. Unfortunately, they are sitting unused on my desk right now because I'm waiting for the ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500 to arrive. *sigh*
:-/
If SGI were still making 1600SWs, I would have sold about three more to my friends/family. As it is, I'm encouraging my family to get regular flat-panels instead. It's so sad that SGI stopped making the gorgeous icon of design that is the 1600SW. *sniff*
I love you, 1600SW!
Oooh, I've had SGI machines crash regularly and often. IRIX - at least some of the earlier versions - were not especially stable, and could be reliably borked by doing simple user tasks. Like running the default editor on NFS-mounted files.
SGI make nice kit. IRIX is an excellent operating system in some areas, especially scalability. But me, I'd mount a scratch monkey.
From http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2002/ja nuary/fuel.html
"Cost-conscious customers will also appreciate the introduction of this powerful system at $11,495 U.S. List, a 35% price reduction on the previous entry price for an SGI high-performance 64-bit workstation."
If you guys just looked at "Highlights", very close to the picture of the new workstation, and clicked to know a bit more about this new product, you guys wouldn't be complaining that how funny is that prices are never listed close to the description page.
Sun is about to fully leapfrog SGI with their next generation of graphics. Their Sunblade workstations are great value for money and run the same OS across the whole range from rackmount servers, worktstations to 106 processor mainframe replacements. Their Sunblade 100 workstation is under $1K US.
Sun are the number #1 vendor of UNIX servers and workstations.
As a side note I saw a bunch of 02 workstations on sale for about $1400Aus in a low end storefront window two days ago. SGI must be dumping stock.
And Solaris is NOT a real time OS.
IRIX is real time.
Even with 1024 processors it runs real time processes.
Solaris can't touch that.
...and a PCI bus (finally).
Hate to nit-pick, but what does that mean? As far as I can see, every machine SGI has produced since (and including) the
O2 has PCI slots, either standard or as an option.
Interesting to me is that SGI have promised to release a whole slew of new graphics machines in the near future, of which this seems to be the first.
I've got to admit that while the Fuel looks reasonable, I'm hanging out to see what real innovations come out of this. Maybe
this?
A 14 day modeling operation on a challenge S would take about 6 hours on a dual athlon... the challenge was NOT designed to be a cfd platform, and using it as one (even back when a 200mhz r4400 was fast) would be as silly as trying to do graphics work on an intel box. The only reason to use a challenge or an indy for that kind of work is if you want to have binary compatible code that will run on an origin. Even that is silly, because irix 6.5 on a challenge S in miserably slow.
which is, i think, the original posters point. Such a pity sgi lost the mhz war b/c their architectures are incredible, but only for what they are designed for.
neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
... but why finally PCI ???
...
SGI has made much more advanced bus for years
#include "coucou.h"
Is the SGI workstation wireless? Is it handheld? Is it a lego brick?
Just PCI slots? Come on, even Macs are using AGP now.
Fine point: specs are pretty much useless. Though advertising specs marginally compare to advertising specs and never to real world applications.
u ll.htm
I'll also grant that IRIX is a truly wonderful OS. I loved using it... (But OSX is a real competitor, some might even think superior).
Right now I've got a PC laptop under my fingers and right on the desk is an Indigo II Extreme last turned on to retrieve files a year ago. Cost my company $20,000. We switched to PCs for CAD because we could get 5 PC cycles for the price of an SGI and the performance advantage had evaporated (we run Pro/E and the benchmark specs are both inarguable and push even big iron workstations under well equipped PCs). Real numbers? http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/ocorten/BENCH30/bf
I've also got a similar vintage door stop Micron PII and an 8300 cluttering my cube. Obsolescence strikes all computers equally, but price and product cycle don't. Used to be that the "new" SGI on the block was inarguably the only "real" choice for graphics--even if it cost 5x what a top-of-the-line PC cost. And it held that position for almost an entire SGI product cycle.
Today the new SGI is arguably inferior to the new Mac (an easy comparison due to concurrent announcements), or arguably superior, depending on religion, but at least no longer inarguably superior.
The GF4 does hardware T&L as well, the display output is 24bit for both (and apple traditionally has industry leading color calibration tools), etc; though the VPro V12 may indeed be superior in meaningful ways... today... even if that's true, the GF5 will be out long before the next generation of SGI graphic hardware.
Note the corrections to your assumptions on the G4 FP Ops; but even given MIPS 64bit ops vs. G4's 32 (see other posts), the G4 is faster (in this arguably meaningless weenie joust) to the _future_ R1800 let alone the lesser R1400A currently shipping.
The point isn't an absolute comparison - there are many reasons one might want an SGI (and system bandwidth is probably more important than the other specs). The real point is that the relentless cycle of commodity hardware wins over the old guard, not just eventually but these days before it even ships.
If one is looking for the real bargain in a graphics workstation, get the Linux kit for PS2. As Crazy Eddie used to say: "volume volume volume...."
As a matter of fact I do. Own three of them. Great little machines. Use them for programming, software testing and support, internet communication, mp3 playing, cd burning, and analog media capture both video and audio.
Got them for a song. They have proven their worth to me over and over again.. Like I mentioned earlier in the parent post. Something designed to perform a given task *right* retains its working value long after other machines are forgotten. These little guys will basically keep doing what I want them to until the hardware actually breaks.
The thing I like most about the Indy is the form factor. There is so much in such a small space. The only thing missing from the package is a slightly faster CPU. The best you can get is R5K 180... (Good, but not great.)
Have been looking the O2 over lately.... Hmm back to work!
Blogging because I can...
Your little post is humerous enough. Why use one of these instead of a dual 1GHz Power Macintosh? Do you know what real UNIX is? Do you know what IRIX is, and have you ever used it? I use it daily, I'm using it right now on my 2-week old, $100,000 Octane2. It's the fastest workstation of any kind I've ever used, and I've used everything, from the older SGI Power Series up to the new Sun Blades, IBM RS/6000, and the depressingly underperforming HP J6700. I can tell that you've never used IRIX because you don't mention it. SGIs have the Unified Memory Archetecture. Not availible on Power Macintosh. You get much better built equipment as well, because this isn't everyone's power macintosh, it's built perfectly for your professional needs. Also, it's ridiculous. LINUX CLUSTERS?!?!?! Why not buy a few SGI Onyx3000s with the new InfinitePerformace and InfiniteReality3 Graphics systems?! Insanity!
-If you see a BIG shining blue light coming from a house that's semi on fire in Asheville, NC, you know it's me. -A l
Wow. Criticizing SGI's price/performance ratio really gets a lot of flames in return. Not that it matters, but yes, I have used IRIX machines before. Specifically, an 8 processor Onyx server w/ Reality Engine 2 graphics, if I recall. It's a bit dated, but it was a fine $1,000,000 machine back in the day, I think. We used it for running some image processing research programs that we wrote. For that purpose, I can't really see why you wouldn't use Alpha's or even Linux or BSD x86 boxes or even Mac OS X machines. Most of the work we did on Sun Ultra 1 workstations and old Sparcstation 20's.
The only reason I can see for using SGI IRIX/MIPS machines is when you have tons of legacy applications that you need to run. Custom CAD/CAM things.
If you're using a machine for Maya (as a lot of game designers or 3d animators would be using it), it makes more sense to buy a $4000 machine (or $5000, once you add a pro-level 3D board) to run your $10,000 piece of software instead of buying a $16,000 (or more, probably) machine for your $10,000 piece of software. $14k vs. $26k.
Anyway, this is stupid. You just wanted to flame.
By the way, this new Fire machine doesn't use UMA. UMA turned out not to make sense when RAM prices dropped like they did.
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.