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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 :)
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.
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.
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?
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!
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...
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
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)
How physically scalable is a G4 renderfarm if you're using Apple non-rackmount systems? It can't be practical even if you use one of the rackmount conversion kits, my Mac looks to be about 3U, which is way too much for even a 2 CPU system (since that's *6* SMP 1U x86 systems, or even more density in some of the new serverblade systems).
I really shouldn't dignify this post with a response, but here goes:
1)ILM and Linux? No, I don't think so. ILM uses SGIs, which means IRIX. They've got a shitload of them, and probably MILLIONS of lines of proprietary code, all written for SGI machines running IRIX. And, unless I'm mistaken, ILM has a deal with SGI where ILM gets SGI's hardware for dirt cheap, in return for being a testbed/advertisement for SGI.
2)500 mhz may not sound like much, but remember: it's a 64-bit CPU. All you'll see in a PC or a Mac is a 32-bit CPU. Yes, yes, I know, more bits != better, but neither does more mhz. Besides, SGIs have an incredible amount of memory bandwidth, due in part to their wide data bus.
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.
I'd just like to say this: You're an idiot. First of all, if you think that ugly red looks better than shiny silver/transparent covers, then you're just damn crazy. Secondly, Macintosh sells high end graphics workstations, and they're pretty good according to most, but you don't hear about them. This SGI would blow any G4 Mac away probably, or maybe not, I don't know, my point is that the home computer G4 isn't designed to compete with SGI machines, but Apple sells computers that are.
~ now you know
Fuel is about as hot as an Octane... which is pretty damn warm. But it's not too bad when you consider that Fuel uses the same chipset as a single Origin 3000 node and blows the doors of a similar equiped Octane/Octane2.
What part of "Linux based render farm with G4 front end "(i.e. workstations) didn't you understand?
I guess that was what you meant though by saying that a G4 renderfarm would suck.
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
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.
One of the fellows in our CS GFX class just returned from a 9 month co-op at PDI/Dreamworks. It sounds to me like PDI is still about 90% SGI on the desktop for modeling, layout, animation, etc. Most of the primary desktop machines are pretty new, mostly Octane2 with VPro graphics. Most of the older Octanes and O2s go to the company newbies or as secondary workstations. They do have a small number of PCs (Windows and Linux) and Macs (Mac OS 9 and X) running 2D paint software and some minor 3D stuff. Rendering and other batch server jobs is all Linux on cheap PC hardware in a server room.
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? --
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
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."
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
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.
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/
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);}
InfiniteReality is the existing Onyx-class graphics pipeline. Its major focus is on huge texture sets (and fast texture loading/swapping), photorealistic quality, and awesome antialiasing.
InfinitePerformance is a new option for Onyx-class graphics. Its major focuses are faster geometry and lower price... at the cost of reduced texture and AA features.
Both are scalable and can come in a variety of configurations (ie, multipipe DPLEX IR vs multipipe IP). Each has a unique target audience. IR (and future versions of IR) are for folks needing extreme quality and HUGE texture sets. IP (and future versions of IP) are for folks looking for a lower cost option and not needing all of the bells and whistles of IR... but still wanting something way cooler and way more expandable/scalable than desktop 3D.
Its major focuses are faster geometry and lower price... at the cost of reduced texture and AA features.
...
IP (and future versions of IP) are for folks looking for a lower cost option and not needing all of the bells and whistles of IR... but still wanting something way cooler and way more expandable/scalable than desktop 3D.
Put another way, IP is more for mechanical CAD guys designing precision-shaped parts (who don't care about the colors/textures too much), and IR is for people in the film or flight simulation type crowds (and other markets that I'm conveniently forgetting.)
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.
You are comparing apples to potatoes.
Apple's claims are nothing but ridiculous, since they are doing pseudo-FP with their velocity engine. These are 8-bit FP Ops that apple uses for their MFLOPS. SGI is using DP-64bit FP Ops for their MFLOPS rating, so theoretically you should divide appple's number by 8 to get the same FP numbers. So apple's G4 is more like a 0.9GFLOP machine. Theoretically then, the R18K is 3x the speed of a G4 at 1GHz at a slower clock speed. So much for Job's Mhz myth! That is why Apple's claims are nothing but a source of good laugh's when they label their systems as "supers", ooohh look 8-bit FP!
Also a Vpro V12 has a) more color depth per pixel, b) siginificantly larger texture memory, c) Most of the OGL pipeline in HW, d) Does geometry processing on chip... and on and on....
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...
Wow, great company.
.com, .net, and .org domains can now be registered
.COM, .NET, .ORG, .EDU domains and
$ whois marathoncomputing.com
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
No match for "MARATHONCOMPUTING.COM".
>>> Last update of whois database: Tue, 29 Jan 2002 05:21:04 EST
The Registry database contains ONLY
Registrars.
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.
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.
$12k per their press release. Certainly a lot cheaper than the days of yore.
I hope SGI can pull this off; I still have a soft spot for Irix, even though most of my computing is MacOS X based nowadays.
D
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
I was lucky enough to snap one up in their closeout offer. $595 plus $31 shipping and sales tax. And it works great on my Mac at home, although the one I had my company buy for me still can't do 1600x1024 thanks to an unfortunate lack of Linux drivers :-(.
:-).
:-(. I describe the 1600SW to Macheads as a 3/4 scale Cinema Display.
Perhaps best of all, since it's the remanufactured special, it still has the old SGI logo on it instead of the new abomination
The Apple Cinema Display is better, but the price difference is rather stunning, especially considering that SGI is the company noted for excessive prices
I was amazed to see that the 1600SW replacement is just 1280x1024 and is therefore just like any other monitor. I'm surprised they gave up the extra resolution, which they should have known was what made their unit special.
Bizarre.
D
ILM has a few SGIs. However, they still are just Unix boxes. There is unlikely anything too "proprietary" about any sourcecode that ILM might have. An intern probably ported it all to Linux in his spare time.
...and as far as "the great deal" goes: rendering one of the ultimately parallel computing activities. They can just throw as many PC's as they need at the problem. No big deal there.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Well I guess I'd better counter this anecdotal evidence with some of my own. I have used Indigos, Indigo2s and O2s up until about 2 years ago and then switched to W2K. In my experience the W2K machines crash less often - though you might need to clarify exactly what 'crash' means.
Oh yeah, if you roll your own software for a Pentium for the visual effects business and know how to use SSE2 you'll leave the SGIs standing at the starting line.
-- SIGFPE
I have never, ever seen an SGI machine crash. I cannot say the same for Macintoshes (and certainly not for Wintel). In fact, I've seen anecdotal evidence that MacOS X.0 had stability problems.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
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...
Actually ILM is indeed making moves to Linux. Surprisingly they said the Linux was more ready for desktops than servers for them. There were a couple of srticles about this, one in CGW (requires free registration):
Linux Invades Hollywood
But here is the relevant section for those that don't want to register:
You can find a couple more references at the website I help mantain:
ILM and Linux
If the statements are correct, that would probably make MIB2 the first ILM project completely done in Linux, but I still have to check. Still you are right for the most part ILM is an SGI house, though don't forget about the Rebel Mac Unit.
In response to the parent of this, while Maya might run under NT and PCs, there is still software that doesn't like Infernos, ILM in house compositing system, Sabre, is based on Inferno. And there are other examples though are probably very specialized apps.
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?
...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?"
Actually, that's French, not Latin, pig or otherwise. And while it may sound foreign to you, it doesn't to me.
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.
Having worked on SGIs for quite a few years with OpenGL, Performer, Inventor and a number of other toolkits, I'll say that SGI does a great job of bringing together hardware and software to make a compelling product. I've worked mostly on their high end products (Onyx, RE, RE2, IR, IR2, Origin, ...), but I've worked on pretty much every workstation they have made.
Render Farm??
Why does everybody think that that's all there is to 3D applications?
If you need to have fast interactive graphics, a render farm isn't going to be what you want to use... Besides, render farms are only a small part of 3D graphics market; there ARE other applications.
SGI/IRIX versus M$ Winblows
I've programmed in both, and I'll tell you that getting a 3D app up and running in IRIX for me has been WAY faster and easier than M$ crap. There is just no comparing the two. Although I do have my share of rants about unix (my preferred os) and especially about open source (I know that I'm going to get flamed by many for saying that open source has its problems).
Don't even ask me about OpenGL compliance...
Stupid M$, they always ruin real standards.
Features
Many of the high end SGI graphics engines have many features that you don't really get with the el cheapo cards.
Rick Beluzzo, the ass
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I sometimes think that Rick Beluzzo was in Microsoft's employ the whole time he was at SGI, just to sabotage SGI. talking about a person with a complete lack of vision and direction. He completely hurt SGI by taking them towards a commodity market. Hmmmm.... let's see. We completely rule the realtime 3D market, so let's try to sell PCs instead and make no margins doing so. Talking about a really tough market where it is hard to differentiate yourself. I was completely baffled by SGI spending millions of dollars to change their name to SGI (from Silicon Graphics), when everybody in the universe already referred to them as SGI. Ugh!
The whole Fahrenheit thing made me a bit leary too; I always glaze over when I hear talk of all-encompassing/panacea solutions.
I, for one, hope that SGI pulls ahead again; they were fun to work with.
-Ralph
is that the "prop" program that I see on every sitcom?
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
Is the SGI workstation wireless? Is it handheld? Is it a lego brick?
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.