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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 :)
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
Congratulations! You have the first "can it run Linux?" (implied) troll post!!! -15 karma points for you baby. I love these. Wow, I love that new Ultra 10k, but can it run Linux? Pfffft.
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!
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...
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
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
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
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."
Well I already knew that before the mess but recent wars between intel and amd has tought me something which most of the people don't seem to get: with enough competition between two strong componies, a product line can evolve to unimaginable heights. The x86 line is fast, so fast that they make everything else seem ridiculously slow or ridiculously expensive or both. The x86s were not designed to be one size fits all, but it turned out they came to be just that.
One can buy a dedicated super-computer for 1000X the price and 100X the power, or a computer 3X the price 2X the power but noone in their right minds should buy a computer 2X the power with a 10X higher cost. Instead one would buy two x86s and match the power or buy five of them and do some weird stuff!
Price/Performance doesn't get in the way if you cannot get the performace you want no matter the price on an alternative platform. Older SGIs were expensive too, but they are one of the few computers that could cut it. You couldn't just buy a hundered 486s and expect same performace. This just doesn't happen anymore except for supercomputers. Current x86s are very fast that there is no offering in the 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!
Frankly, linux isnt ready to scale to 256, 512, 1024 processors... Irix is designed to scale to that point and has utilities and such to make it manageable. When linux gets those tools it'll become more of a player on the high end. I think this has been discussed to death, but.. to optimize a system for high end computing is to make it hard to use on low end computers. So, you can't easily have that pretty linux PDA and your pretty linux supercomputer too.
Actually, that's French, not Latin, pig or otherwise. And while it may sound foreign to you, it doesn't to me.