Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the we-wants-it-we-do dept.
Jonathan C. Patschke writes "SGI unveiled two new graphics workhorses today, the Tezro
(an Octane2 replacement) and the much-anticipated Onyx 4. The presence of the old "bug" logo warms the cockles of my heart, even if the desktop Tezro looks much like a subwoofer."
"If you love something you must set it free. We love these workstations, so we're releasing them today. If it's meant to be, they'll be returned to us... after their hefty leases are up."
Re:SGI quoted Sting saying
by
digitalunity
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· Score: 1
Even if you hate IRIX, you can always keep it plugged in as a space heater. The newest Onyx4 Power puts off over 5000 BTU/hr. That's better than the spaceheater in my house!
-- You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
The huge news with the new systems does not seem to be mentioned on SGIs site. They use ATI chips/cards for the graphics.... SGI has given up on doing proprietary graphics solutions it would seem.. and with good reason imnsho!
Not so good reason imho. The new Onyx graphics have less texture memory than InfiniteReality, no 48 bit color and lacks all the extensions of IR. Sure, it's faster, but couldn't they have tried to speed up IR instead of going with Ati ?
This is Silicon Graphics we're talking about. They used to be the only option.
I agree... we are using SGI systems for which there simply does not exist a PC equivelent. The graphics subsystems, now an ancient six or seven years old (when did IR come out?) still outperforms, in many instances, anything available on PCs.
It's not just about raw polygon numbers, it's throughput and combining things like live video textures and so forth - things we use for live, on-air graphics that simply can't be done on any PC graphics cards we've seen, and that includes a very recent test (about a month ago) - our accountants would love for us to replace SGIs with PCs, it just won't work.
But now I'm sure we'd see the same limitations we have with PCs by using these ATI cards. So seven year old technology is still better than the new stuff (for our purposes).
First off they are no longer Silicon Graphics... their name is officially SGI.
I am not completely familiar with IR or the exact ATI chip used in these boexes, but the FireGL X1 (based on Radeon 9700) can do 24bit(floating point)/channel, althoght the DAC is (iirc) only 10bit/channel. Is the 48bit color you speak of 12bit/channel fixed point?
What extensions are available on the IR that you can't get on a ATI?
I really doubt they could have sped up IR enough since they have almost no graphics patents/engineers left. Over the years 3Dfx, Microsoft, Nvidia, and ATI have pretty well divided up and taken/purchased all the graphics talent/patents at SGI.
ps
several years ago nvidia actually produced several workstations based on nvidia graphics chips, but that particular product line was VERY quickly EOLed. That was a while back when SGI was thrashing around and tried doing x86 'VisualWorkstations' (just before their ceo went to work at M$). They were kind of neat, but were very dificult to use b/c they had an odd mix of proprietary and standard parts that meant you almost had a(n unpleasent) surprise in store when working with them.
Re:ATI !!!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
First off they are no longer Silicon Graphics... their name is officially SGI.
No, their name is officially Silicon Graphics, Inc. SGI is their "DBA", a "doing business as" name.
the FireGL X1 (based on Radeon 9700) can do 24bit(floating point)/channel
He's talking about RGBA12, which is twelve bits for RGB and twelve bits for an alpha channel. Hardly anybody uses RGBA12. Most everybody uses RGB12. A few people use RGB32f.
What extensions are available on the IR that you can't get on a ATI?
Lots. Go look up the Infinite Reality programmer's guide.
several years ago nvidia actually produced several workstations based on nvidia graphics chips
This has nothing to do with the graphics thing. It was part of SGI's ill-advised effort to build and sell commodity Linux and Windows workstations. Nobody bought. The plan failed. Blame Rocket Rick.
They were kind of neat, but were very dificult to use b/c they had an odd mix of proprietary and standard parts that meant you almost had a(n unpleasent) surprise in store when working with them.
No. There were two generations of SGI Windows workstations: the 320/540, and the 230/330/550. The first generation used SGI graphics and had proprietary guts. The second generation used NVidia graphics and had commodity guts.
First off they are no longer Silicon Graphics... their name is officially SGI.
Yeah, I know. Another of their stupid mistakes.;) They are trying to bring back the cube and the Silicon Graphics name though. Look at the picture of the Tezro.:)
I am not completely familiar with IR or the exact ATI chip used in these boexes, but the FireGL X1 (based on Radeon 9700) can do 24bit(floating point)/channel, althoght the DAC is (iirc) only 10bit/channel. Is the 48bit color you speak of 12bit/channel fixed point?
I believe it is 12bit/channel integer all the way to the DAC, but I could be wrong.
What extensions are available on the IR that you can't get on a ATI?
I don't have a handy list available, but you can look here for more information: http://www.sgi.com/visualization/onyx/3000/ir/ir4. html For example, I don't think the Ati cards have Image Based Rendering.
I'm not sure what is still left of the talent that they once had. A lot of them left, indeed.
As to the Sgi workstation with NVidia graphics, that was the VW 330, which was basically a standard PC. You may be confused with the VW 320, which had an architecture like the O2 and had graphics designed by Sgi themselves.
So what does this mean for Linux or BSD on SGI hardware? From what I have seen in the past, you can only run Linux or BSD as a headless machine on SGI hardware since the video cards are not supported. Hopefully now that they are using ATI chipsets you can actaully have X and stuff on an SGI.
Tezro uses the SGI-engineered Vpro (tm...)V12 graphics - Tezro at a glance
The Onyx4 is the one using ATI graphics cards in parallel.
Maybe the Tezro2 will use ATI cards sometime next year, as the graphics engine changes filter down. It's roughly what's happened before (Octane replaced Indigo2, using I2 'Impact' graphics engine. Later VPro graphics system came in.)
-- "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
One of the good reasons SGI is now using non-proprietary graphics cards is that they had a substantial brain drain to nVidia back when nVidia was a start-up. Almost all of nVidia's lead techs came from SGI. Since then, SGI hasn't been able to get back on track, unfortunately.
SGI *used* to have gfx hardware that was in a class WAY beyond anything on the shelves. When the low-end O2 was released, the best you could find for a PC was a Voodoo 2. In addition, SGI was a leader in developing and driving OpenGL. After Rick Beluzzo took over SGI, there was a brutal stop to this, and these days, OpenGL 1.3 is the same as OpenGL 1.3 from several years ago. Games no longer use OpenGL -- it's all DirectX.
Yeah, I can understand why SGI does what they do now, but it's still sad to see. Let's hope they survive and get another shot at brilliance down the road.
Regards, -- *Art
I want my SGI...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Funny
/me does a Dire Straits riff on his air guitar...
Re:I want my SGI...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You know that Sting actually wrote and sang that? It's the same riff as in "Don't Stand So Close To Me."
To the silly ass moderator who thought that the above comment was a troll, it wasn't. If I had my mod points today (instead of burning them all yesterday) this would've gotten a +1 Funny from me.
In their 1985 Album Brothers In Arms there was a song called "Money For Nothing" in which Sting sang the famous refrain "I Want My MTV" in the background, while Mark Knopfler pretends to be a moving man who gripes about his career choices versus "the little faggot with the earring and the make up...got his own jet airplane, that little faggot he a millionaire".
Obviously, this was a play on words, you can easily sing "I want my SGI" to the tune of that song. But it's not really the moderator's fault for not knowing that. He was probably born the year that song came out!
Mark Knopfler and Sting were both teachers of English from Newcastle-upon-Tyne before becoming musicians. Sting's brother is a milk man and looks a lot like him aparently.
It's great to see SGI hanging in there, even though the industries in which they used to dominate have largely become the territory of cheap Linux PCs. While SGIs can no longer boast superior hardware of software, their brand still holds enough cachet for them to stick around a few more years a la Apple.
--
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
What's so great about watching a company that was unable to out-innovate something else (Linux) hanging around and continuing to sell their second-best solution for twice as much? Screw nostalgia, this is business.
Re:cool
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Re:cool
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
I am not sure that the problem is innovation. I think Linux has become popular because of cost. I don't think there is anything you can do on Linux that you can't do on IRIX.
Re:cool
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
That's what I've been noticing for years now. I've got Solaris,HP-UX and recently IRIX at home, but not Linux. Why? Because I can't find anything that Linux offers that I don't already have.
Just because you've loaded up our retirement accounts with SGI stock, don't delude these nice people. The SGI brand is worth very little in the areas in which they are trying to compete. And Linux does a better job, with more software available. The Apple comparison is particulartly inapt, because SGI has never achieved Apple's niche market. Next you'll be saying that everyone should buy SGI stock because Sauron is going to standardize on SGI. Everyone knows that Sauron runs only Windows.
By the way, don't forget to pick up the Rohanese food for dinner tonight. Thanks,
Shelob
-- Shelob Wife of Boromir, Queen of Gondor and Minas Tirith
Play dead when stabbed by hairy-foots.
Actually... it was a very good troll. I really think there needs to be a +1 troll option for the trolls that generate good responses.
Re:cool
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You have very low troll expectations.
Oh come on
by
mao+che+minh
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Like the average Slashdot reader (99%) has any use for or can justify the price of a SGI "graphics work station".
Now watch, some "expert troll" is about to come out of the woodworks and point out a bunch of cheap SGI systems or "I use SGI because of....and therefore it is not 99%.....blah blah".
1% of these is 8,000 people--so, unless more people come out of the woodowork for this story than have ever commented on a story, ever, "99%" will be accurate.
I have two on my desk right now (an O2 and an Octane), and a couple servers in colo.
You seem to be forgetting that some people use their computers for work at work rather than playing the latest game at home. SGI systems are extremely good at what they do, and they make bad-ass systems for almost any problem that needs a lot of memory bandwidth.
But, yes, it'd be hard to justify a $40k workstation to play Unreal Tournament. It'd also be hard to justify an 18-wheeler to drive to the office every morning. It's all about situation and perspective.
However, used SGIs can be had for cheap-cheap on eBay. Try one sometime. If you keep an open mind, the SGI bug will bite you, and someday, you too might have an Onyx XL in your dining room.:)
-- Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
no no no man you just don't *GET* it! you're a dirty capitalist whore if you buy an sgi! if you can't do what you need to do on a 486 running linux then you don't deserve to be doing it!
And very few of us will drive a Ferrari, but they are still heavily promoted on the front pages of MoterTrend and Road and Track many months. I guess no one wants to read a magazine about the rusty, sputtering 75 hp Dodge Dart. Why should computers be any different?
-- Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
And the high price tag is worth it when you have very little down time doing 3D work compared to what we have with PCs.
And for real-time graphics we have yet to find a PC with ANY hardware that can output NTSC as nicely as the Onyx2 we use for live, on-air graphics. We were contemplating a PC, but even with the best video cards it couldn't run the scenes we had already created and ran on the SGI.
My department has switched mostly over to PCs, and because of pressure from accounting they are looking for ways to replace the SGIs with cheaper equipment, but there are areas where it's simply still not possible. I don't expect we'll be downgrading to consumer level graphics though, and we'll continue using the existing systems.
-- Stupid sexy Flanders.
Re:Oh come on
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Hah, wow. I misread that to say "I've got more SGI's than I can count at the office, with 3000 on order."
That *would* be more SGI's than anyone could probably count!:)
If you keep an open mind, the SGI bug will bite you, and someday, you too might have an Onyx XL in your dining room.:)
Does one in your garage count? Don't have 220v in the dining room so that's a no go (that and the thought of being bludgened to death by my wife with a 4 processor R4400 board).
Re:Oh come on
by
zorro2676
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· Score: 2, Informative
SGI used to (and may still) have an 18-wheeler for demo purposes. It does my heart good to know that someone was able to justify not only the cost of an 18-wheeler, but an 18-wheeler packed to the gills with SGI equipment.:)
Oh, and what did they have running on the InfiniteReality2 Dual-Rack? A flight sim.
It justified the cost when we were all chugging along on our PC100 SDRAM machines while O2's smoked us at 2.1GB/sec, but now modern PCs have more memory bandwidth (almost twice) than high-priced SGI workstations?
--
<Amanda`> I just went out to the parking lot in my bathrobe to exchange warez CDs.
OK, I'll bite, but I doubt I fall into the catagory of "expert", let alone "expert troll".
SGI for a couple of years produced (back in 2000 from memory) the best PCs I have ever come across. The specs were unimpresive, the price outrageous, but the performance was unbelivable.
I'm not actually refering to graphics power (which I assume would have been great but I never used it), but the raw hard processing power. The code I was compiling, took 20 minutes on my old machine, 8 minutes on my new suppsedly bad ass machine and 2 minutes on the lower spec'ed SGI PC.
Unfortunalty SGI stopped producing them because people though they were just paying extra for the logo. No one realised until they were using them that you got every penny you paid for and them some.
If SGI started selling PCs again, then I'd have one in an instant and no, I still don't do any graphics stuff.
-- Do you really think I'm go to put something novel here?
Re:Oh come on
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
No, no, no, no, no. The 3.2 GB/s figure is the external interconnect speed. That's the Bedrock-to-Bedrock speed, if that means anything to you.
Memory bandwidth between the CPU's and the RAM is on the order of 16 GB/s... but I don't remember the exact figure. (16? 12? Something monstrous.)
On a Tezro, which is just a single-node SN2, that's your min and max bandwidth. On a multi-node SN2 like an Onyx 4 or an Origin 3900, it's your max bandwidth, and the min is 3.2 GB/s.
Up to 32 ATI Chips
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0, Redundant
You can plug up to 32 ATI R300 class cores into one of these puppies. Might even run Doom III fast.
Yet more machines for geeks to dribble over.. I know I wouldn't mind one of those on my desk, even if all I used it for was browsing the net and checking my email..
Though its worth bearing in mind that you can still pick up some half decent SGI workstations on eBay.. seen some SGI Octane / 20" Monitor / 768MB RAM bundles on UK eBay for around £350 which is a superb deal.. these things might be getting on a bit, but they certainly do shift.
I used to own both an old Indy and an Indigo2, both of which would be the equivilant of an 8086 in PeeCee computing terms.. but they still cruised along even on the latest version of Irix, and were surprisingly usable:)
Really must get another SGI some day..
-- "Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I used to own both an old Indy and an Indigo2, both of which would be the equivilant of an 8086 in PeeCee computing terms..
Actually, no, they aren't. A more accurate comparison would be a P5 series processor at a similar clock rate.
You forget the several previous generations of machines such as the Indigo or the Personal Iris and they were drastically faster than an 8086... To find the first machines produced you have to go waaaaay back to 1983 and the Iris1X00.
Re:Nice...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Indy: an Indigo without the "go"
Re:Nice...
by
sql*kitten
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Though its worth bearing in mind that you can still pick up some half decent SGI workstations on eBay.. seen some SGI Octane / 20" Monitor / 768MB RAM bundles on UK eBay for around £350 which is a superb deal.. these things might be getting on a bit, but they certainly do shift.
I used to own both an old Indy and an Indigo2, both of which would be the equivilant of an 8086 in PeeCee computing terms.. but they still cruised along even on the latest version of Irix, and were surprisingly usable:)
A PC is a general purpose device that is designed not to suck too badly at anything in particular. A workstation is a specialist device that is designed to retain some general purpose capability. Back in its day, the Indigo2 IMPACT was an impressive machine... you couldn't buy a PC that could do what it could do at any price. Even now, they can hold their own in solid modelling and CAD.
I have an Octane SE here, 1997 vintage, and my 2002-issue Dell beats it for small CPU bound jobs... but for anything involving a lot of memory accesses, or disk I/O the Octane wins hands down every time. And if I'm not using textures, SE graphics can easily beat a GeForce2.
I used to own both an old Indy and an Indigo2, both of which would be the equivilant of an 8086 in PeeCee computing terms.. but they still cruised along even on the latest version of Irix, and were surprisingly usable:)
Most of the Indy's I've seen are in the 125 Mhz range...They may have made much slower ones, but these are a lot closer to original pentium than 8086.
an Indy is probably best compared to a Pentium Pro or PII. Indys came as fast as 180 MHz, and use 64-bit CPUs (MIPS R44000, R4600, or R5000) with relativey low instruction latency. Clock for clock, they probably perform somewhere beteen x86 and PowerPC chips, except maybe for 64-bit integer operations (which would need to be emulated on x86 and pre-G5 PPC).
I don't really consider calling the Indy or the Ingigo2 the equivalent of an 8086 to be a fair comparison.
The Indy had a 32-bit processor (could take the R4000, R4600, R4400, or the R5000), and the R5000 for the Indy could go up to 180mhz.
The Indigo2 originally had a 32-bit processor, but later models were made that used a 64-bit processor.
Are they slow by modern standards? Hell yes. But even the slowest Indy is an order of magnitude better than the fastest 8086 machine.
LANL's purchase...
by
anzha
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· Score: 3, Informative
LANL bought an 80 processor Onyx 4. Check HPC Wire for the story.
-- Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Reason for ATI - Re:ATI !!!
by
bazik
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· Score: 5, Informative
Reason for this change is that a InfiniteReality4 can calculate 3 millionen polygons/s, a ATI chip can do about 10 millionen polygons/s in immediate mode or 75 millionen polygons/s in display list mode.
Re:Reason for ATI - Re:ATI !!!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
... the other reason is if I remember correctly, that Nvidia bought out SGI gfx division.
Re:Reason for ATI - Re:ATI !!!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I think you remember well...
They transferred most of the SGI graphics engineers to NVIDIA back in 1999. SGI no longer does their own graphics chips.
I'd also suppose that some of SGI's engineers also went to ATI evidenced by the relative rapid developments in graphics technology for the 'rest of us'.
How relevant are these boxes?
by
Surak
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Up to 4 700 MHZ MIPS R4000 processors in the rackmount, or up to 2 in the tower. 12-bit alpha channel, 24-bit Z buffer. 128MB graphics memory. p to 8 GB main RAM in the tower, up to 16GB in the rackmount. Nice. SGI's were once the pinnacle of graphics performance, but one has to wonder with the predeominance of cheaper Wintel or Lintel boxes that have practically comparable performance, how relevant are these boxes still?
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
by
SuiteSisterMary
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, can your cheap lintel/wintel solution do on-the-fly manipulation of HDTV streams, for example?
-- Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
by
Surak
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· Score: 1
Sure. With the right hardware and software combination, absolutely. With something along the lines of Softimage DS|HD, sure. Are you implying that the SGI can do that out of the box?
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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chipace
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· Score: 1
Amen. Why doesn't SGI just become a software company. Focus on what you're good at... didn't Pixar completely make the switch to x86.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Actually, yes. (Well, once the HD-SDI I/O interface is released later this summer.)
The DM3 software that comes with the DM3 interface includes a little tool that you can use to display full-bandwidth uncompressed HD in real time with color corrections or geometry manipulations, that kind of thing. It's basically a demo, and an example. (It comes with source code.)
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Oh man. Has it gotten that bad? How can a post like that make it 5. I mean makes no real comment except - Mac is great. The guy probably had to wait the 20 seconds to post it. If he had some industry experience and he has compared the two then I would say mod him up but as it is this off-topic and troll. Don't let your passion for Mac overwhelm your sense of moderative responsibilty.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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lederhosen
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· Score: 1
Can *what*?
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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meatplow
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· Score: 3, Funny
A mac in NO WAY can compare to the ONYX4. You sir are on some strong dope.
Meatplow
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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larry+bagina
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· Score: 1
What the hell are you smoking? Become a software company?
They should release their software under the GPL license (so everybody can improve it for them), and sell support contracts.
-- Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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SuiteSisterMary
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Out of the box, with the addition of a HD i/o card, probably a good SCSI RAID disk pack.
SGI's always been about moving massive amounts of data internally; your (and my) multi-ghz systems are still spending the vast amount of time stroking off while waiting for disk reads, memory copies, that sort of stuff.
I remember getting my shiny new Gefore3 and running the Zoltar demo for the first time. Amazing detail and quality and what not, but it actually pops up a, well, popup, saying 'please wait while we transfer an ungodly amount of data to your video card!'
What's the point of having a whomping video card when it takes a good thirty seconds to a minute just to transfer the data required to render a head and neck?
-- Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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IamTheRealMike
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· Score: 1
That link goes to the web page for Final Cut Pro, which is used for video editing, not 3D graphics manipulation.
SGI boxes are remarkably versatile. You should ponder this before claiming that a PowerMac "can" (can what?)
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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Alan+Partridge
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· Score: 1
No, but I'd put money on a G5 outperforming a Tezro in just about EVERY metric. SGI used to have the highest bandwidth architecture by far, but first PCs and now the Mac G5 have overtaken them by a mile.
SGI became a dying niche manufacturer the day Adobe pulled Photoshop for IRIX. A real shame too, PS would have been pretty sharp on their subsequent workstations.
-- That was classic intercourse!
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Learn to follow a threaded discussion, "can" immediately follows the description of HDTV manipulation.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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spicyjeff
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· Score: 1
No one said anything about 3D image manipulation. The comment I replied to asked about HDTV manipulation.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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spicyjeff
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· Score: 1
I was not comparing hardware. I was answering a question about other systems that can do HDTV manipulation. RTFR
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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tbone1
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· Score: 1
I am an absolute Apple nut... if you'll allow me a mixed metaphor... but no. Sorry.
I've used SGIs and I own a Mac, and I love my Mac, but please try to keep this discussion restricted to worlds where the sky is blue.
--
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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mnemonic_
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· Score: 1
Some high-end video editing software (Flame, Inferno) is only available on Irix. SGI boxes are still used requently for high end 3d graphics as well (Alias|wavefront still has an Irix version of Maya, though of course A|w is a subsidiary of SGI).
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You misspelled "steal it from them."
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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sql*kitten
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· Score: 1
Up to 4 700 MHZ MIPS R4000 processors in the rackmount
I think you mean R14000 or R16000 - the R4000 was released in 1991! Incidentally, the R4000 was fully 64-bit, MIPS had mastered this tech over a decade before Intel.
SGI's were once the pinnacle of graphics performance, but one has to wonder with the predeominance of cheaper Wintel or Lintel boxes that have practically comparable performance, how relevant are these boxes still?
2 things the SGIs have that PCs don't: bandwidth and precision. The SGIs are built to shift data around at phenominal speed internally 3.2Gb/s point to point with no contention. These really are desktop supercomputers, because SGI feed their mainframe tech back down into workstations. The bus speed means you can use one CPU to page textures in and out of the cache while another traverses huge structures in main memory, with no slowdown.
Not only that, but SGI graphics is precise. A PC card oriented towards gamers will sacrifice precision for speed. In a game it doesn't matter - if you're redrawing 60 times a second, it doesn't matter if a few things are a few pixels off from frame to frame. In CAD you can't afford to have any artifacts, because the risk of an engineer deciding that his assembly really does align when it doesn't is too high. That's why, on paper, SGIs are sometimes slower - they're doing more work, and that's what serious workstations users pay for.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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leeet
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· Score: 1
How revelent is Ferrari vs. Ford?
Both companies use the same technology yet if you had the choice, which one would you buy (if you could afford)?
For some people, the price doesn't matter and 1 second is worth that price. For others, they would rather buy many fords and consider that "hey, I made a good deal".
Sure, your ford will take you to your 7-11 and even go on the highway at 55 Mph, but other than that, if you want kick ass performance, you'll need a Ferrari. A corvette might give you pretty good performance but still, there's always something better behind a company that devote itself at building high-end cars.
Now just think the same way using computers... Got it?
-- --
Leeeter than leet
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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Dynedain
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· Score: 3, Informative
I call BS
I do compositing using Combustion on my dual-athlon 2200 w/ 2GB RAM, and I've used it for 1080i HDTV......nowhere near realtime (try about 1:30 per frame for the output rendering). Combustion is the x86 version of the same apps from discreet (Flame) which runs on these SGI workstations in REALTIME.
-- I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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Alan+Partridge
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· Score: 1
Flame is quite a bit better specced than Combustion, but your Athlon beast has WAY more CPU resources than an Octane.
WAY more.
Don't forget, most decent Flame installations will have a lot of extra rendering resources across the LAN to provide the necessary horsepower.
-- That was classic intercourse!
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If you're going to reply to the wrong parent, have the courtesy to copy what you're replying to.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
No, but I'd put money on a G5 outperforming a Tezro in just about EVERY metric.
You mean every mac-biased photoshop metric?
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
1. You're a known troll. Stop it.
2. An entire 1080i frame can fit IN CACHE in an Octane 2. Which is why you can do most operations in real time at HD resolution.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
by
KewlPC
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· Score: 1
The R4000 was 32-bit. SGI didn't use 64-bit processors until the R8000.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
by
Alan+Partridge
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· Score: 1
No, I mean a sitting-around-waiting-for-it-to-finish-rendering metric.
-- That was classic intercourse!
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
by
Alan+Partridge
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· Score: 1
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
incidentally, a 1080i FRAME is the same size as a 1080 FRAME - what are you blathering about?
-- That was classic intercourse!
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
See? You are a troll.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"1080" is not an HDTV format. "1080i" is. Idiot.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
HAAAHAHAHahHAHAhahhaahhaAHAHHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Overrated TROLL!
--$$$$$exyKrout
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
That's not true - The 4k series was internally 64-bit. The R8k was the first internally _and_ externally.
The presence of the old "bug" logo warms the cockles of my heart, even if the desktop Tezro looks much like a subwoofer
What is a computer supposed to look like, and why?
I thought the Tezro was kind of nifty looking, other than its Nintendo Purple color scheme.
Re:question
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The Tezro looks like something that would bounce if you dropped it. . . like a large, purple, cingular wireless logo. Like an amateur artist's first attempt at using Maya's 'Extrude' feature.
Computers, like coffee tables, need to have hard edges. Edges tell children "Don't play too rough near me, because you'll walk away bloody." This is the message I want to have my computer tell my children.
Re:question
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
SGI has used purple and blue color schemes for their boxes for years, nintendo hasn't, until the GameCube came along.
Tezro is bigger than an Octane 2, 20" deep, and weighs 60 pounds. If you drop one, everything else will bounce. The Tezro will leave a nice, rounded crater in your floor.
A few notes...
by
green+pizza
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· Score: 5, Informative
Tezro comes in both desktop and rackmount form factors. 1 - 4 MIPS R16000 processors, up to 16 GB RAM, 7 PCI-X slots from 3 busses. Based on Origin 350 architecture.
Onyx4 "supports" up to 32 graphics GPUs, but more can be added. Each pipe can drive one or two displays or up to 16 GPUs can be used together in parallel for increased performance. Onyx4 is essentially a new graphics brick to be used on Origin 300 or 3000 class host systems.
There are gobs of new SD and HD video card available for both new systems, as well as new audio card offerings. Both machines will seem to require at least IRIX 6.5.21 (the August 2003 quarterly release) to run.
Re:A few notes...
by
pmz
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Onyx4 "supports" up to 32 graphics GPUs, but more can be added. Each pipe can drive one or two displays or up to 16 GPUs can be used together in parallel for increased performance.
Trash! My new PC supports AGP 31.415x and has DDR 7000pHz RAM all for $8.65! Hyperthreading and RAM hacks to the max!
(I'm just joking, here; my most powerful PC is actually a old SunPCi card, for better or worse)
What would be interesting is a comparison of the recent high-end offerings. Sun released their V880z machine recently, and I'm sure IBM could throw something into the mix. However, I guess the manufacturers would hesitate to mail $150,000 samples to magazine reviewers:(
barney the dinosaur is purple
by
peter303
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· Score: 0, Troll
So are are SGI MIPS-based workstations are dinosaurs.
Re:barney the dinosaur is purple
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
So are are I are can't speak properly.
Re:barney the dinosaur is purple
by
Ch_Omega
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· Score: 1
So are are SGI MIPS-based workstations are dinosaurs.
The Preview button kinda looses it's point when the poster is too stoned to notice that what he wrote, looks like something that could well have been written by said purple dinosaur.:)
A very GOOD THING [TM]
by
green+pizza
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· Score: 4, Interesting
By using ATI GPUs, SGI can focus on their architecture, I/O, and SD/HD video options, rather than try to fight the ATI/NVIDIA 3D battle.
The new Onyx4 systems are able to drive multiple GPUs independently or in parallel for even more performance. All of this is backed by gobs of CPUs an many GB of RAM to feed the gfx.
Re:A very GOOD THING [TM]
by
Billly+Gates
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· Score: 3, Insightful
But doesn't SGI use only 400mhz processors?
Yes the mhz myth bla bla bla but I have yet found a processor that can do 10x more work per clock cycle then a standard P4. The p4 is out 4ghz so the processors in these beats would have to be 10x as efficient.
High speed ddram and rambus as well as scsi in high end pc based workstations offer a much better solution for 10th of the cost.
Re:A very GOOD THING [TM]
by
Alan+Partridge
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· Score: 4, Informative
700Mhz
3.2Ghz
32/7=4.57
maybe you should master your calculator before graduating to a personal computer?
-- That was classic intercourse!
Re:A very GOOD THING [TM]
by
fgodfrey
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· Score: 4, Insightful
So I assume that your Pentium 4 comes with up to 1 Terabyte of RAM and 512 processors (well, ok, so you'd have to go to an Origin 3800 with the graphics pipe to get 512p) in a single system? 'Cause that's what the Onyx4 can be purchased with. Also, SGI hasn't used 400 MHz processors for a few years. I'm not up on their current CPU's but another reply to your post indicates that it's 700 MHz.
Also, this thing can move more bandwidth back and forth to memory than your PC can dream of. The link between nodes is 1.6GB/sec full duplex ( Of course, we over at Cray can do 16 times that but I digress So the moral is, while you can sort of get away with doing a MHz-MHz comparison on two different processors, the overall architecture of the system is what counts if you really want to get work done. This is why SGI and Cray are still in business.
-- Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Re:A very GOOD THING [TM]
by
fgodfrey
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· Score: 2, Interesting
See, this is what I get for not using "preview". Right after the "I digress", insert the following:
The link to local memory is even faster. When you are doing scientific computing, ie. what these machines are sold for, odds are your problem isn't going to come close to fitting in cache in which case your poor P4 is going to spend 50% or more of its time waiting for the results of loads from memory.
-- Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Re:A very GOOD THING [TM]
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Not to piss in your Cheerios or anything, but Chimera and SN2/Voyager weren't designed for sci/tech. They were designed for vis/sim and media. Period.
Memory bandwith is not the worse aspect of the P4.
With a i865PE or i875P mainboard + dual DDR 400, the main memory bandwith is 6.4 GB/s theorical. 5 GB to 5.5 GB sustained bandwidth can be seen in benchmarks.
In several month, it will probably be pushed to 1 GHz FSB, dual DDR 500 = 8 GB/s.
It's not that bad for a personal computer.
Re:A very GOOD THING [TM]
by
fgodfrey
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· Score: 1
Uh, I'm not sure I know what "Chimera" and "Voyager" code names are, but a) aren't these SN1/MIPS based machines? and b) regardless, the memory controller ASICs in all the NUMA systems are designed for sci/tech as they're all the same ASIC within a class of systems. Ie, all the Origin 3000 based systems use the same ASIC and all SN2 based systems use the same ASIC. Both were designed with scientific computing in mind, these are just smaller configurations of the same thing.
-- Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Re:A very GOOD THING [TM]
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I'm not sure I know what "Chimera" and "Voyager" code names are
Chimera -> SN2 workstation, i.e., Tezro
Voyager -> next generation Infinite Performance graphics for Onyx
aren't these SN1/MIPS based machines?
Nope. They're SN2-based.
Ie, all the Origin 3000 based systems use the same ASIC and all SN2 based systems use the same ASIC.
Yup.
Both were designed with scientific computing in mind
Nope.
Onyx and LOTR
by
GillBates0
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· Score: 5, Interesting
They have an interesting page about the success stories of SGI graphics workstations.
A particularly interestingone about their role in the making of the LOTR:
The Wellington, New Zealand, company is using a full complement of IRIX OS-based Silicon Graphics® Octane® and Silicon Graphics® Onyx2® visual workstations, SGI® Origin® family servers, and SGI Linux OS-based visual workstations and servers to create and manage up to 100TB of data. Cool pictures too.
-- An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
In other news, scientists from the English speaking world are concerned about the increasing rarity of regsitered trademark symbols. Overharvesting for use in press releases and other marketing mediums is considered a prime cause of this shortage.
Be mindful when reading press releases like these. Especially old press releases that refer to events that have already happened as future events. To see why, check out these press releases:
be the equivilant of an 8086 in PeeCee computing terms
You mean they would be non-existent (since the PC never used a 8086 chip)?
-- "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Re:In that case...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I vote Novell.
CONGRATS ON BEING A TOTAL FUCKUP!!!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I need one of those about like I need a semi truck
by
djeaux
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· Score: 2, Informative
However, I want one of those cases!
It makes me wonder, though, why an obvious workhorse machine is packaged up in a box that would make Alienware blush. Sorta like if White Freightliner started slapping Lamborghini-made bodies on their trucks.
OTOH, maybe SGI is onto something, since they market those things to graphic artists & designers...
-- "Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Up to 4 700 MHZ MIPS R4000 processors in the rackmount, or up to 2 in the tower. 12-bit alpha channel, 24-bit Z buffer. 128MB graphics memory. p to 8 GB main RAM in the tower, up to 16GB in the rackmount. Nice. SGI's were once the pinnacle of graphics performance, but one has to wonder with the predeominance of cheaper Wintel or Lintel boxes that have practically comparable performance, how relevant are these boxes still?
If you have gobs of IRIX code you need to run today, or if you need gobs of I/O on a desktop machine today, there isn't much other choice.
You're quoting specs from the Tezro workstation, which BTW, uses R16000 processors, not R4000. The Tezro uses Origin 350 architecture and has 3 PCI-X buses and two XIO buses (for gfx and HD/SD video I/O) as well as two builtin channels of SCSI. The thing is a full fledged data pump that I certainly don't need, but some folks do.
The new Onyx4 also uses Origin 350 and Origin 3000 host architecture, but can use all of that to feed 32+ ATI gfx cores per system. Can have each core drive one or two displays or can have multiple cores working in parallel. Two major uses -- doing crazy high end 3D or for visualizing big supercomputing data.
Just for shits-n-grins, I'd like to see some sgi vs. apple rendering/modeling benchmarks.
Seems to me that sgi's only real computational advantages show up in the data modeling arenae; weather, molecules, etc...
They've both got their plusses and minuses, the most impressive of which differ greatly between machines. Where's the overlap?! That's what I wanna know. How close is Apple *really* to taking on sgi's last vestiges of profitability?
Well SGI is 64-bit, Apple is not (no 64-bit OS). SGI has many CAD programs, Apple has not. Apple is expensive, SGI is more expensive. Apple only got one mouse button, not good for cad.
I would guess that the opteron is better then both the mips and the G5.
If you are spending $3000+ then you can afford another $50 for a good three button mouse. The one-button argument is baseless.
Re:Tezro VS. G5
by
lederhosen
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
If you can handle the complex procedure of buying a mouse, you surly do not need a mac.
Re:Tezro VS. G5
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Apple will have a 64-bit OS available on their 64-bit hardware VERY soon.
Mac OS X has AutoCAD, ArchiCAD, PowerCADD, RealCADD, TouchCAD, VectorWorks, etc. (Not to mention Lightwave, Renderman, Maya, and Pixlet when Panther ships).
Apple's not that expensive for what you get.
I won't bother with the mouse comment.
Re:Tezro VS. G5
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
And you know that because of....what?
You don't own a Mac. You're not in the club.
Go back to playing without your Wal-Mart machine, loser.
None of these arguments really make much sense. The top end of Apple's range and the lower end of SGI's have always overlapped. The difference between the two companies is that Apple is obsessed with offering a compelling multimedia environment to "prosumers", while SGI is more firmly aimed at power-crazed pink-eyed mad scientist types.
apple does not have Catia, IDEAS, UG or any 'real' CAD program. It sucks yes, but it would make things very interresting if apple did have pro level CAD shit.
-- I want 2D games back.
Re:Tezro VS. G5
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
apple does not have Catia, IDEAS, UG or any 'real' CAD program.
CATIA and Pro/E will be out on Panther by the end of the year. (Save up now for Christmas!)
I know this because I sat next to two guys from Dassault at the WWDC keynote. And just a couple rows up was whole busload of guys from PTC. I talked to them at different times and got the same answer: for the G5, by 12/31.
Re:Tezro VS. G5
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Such a comparison makes no sense. SGI machines are not meant to have speedy processors. They're meant to scale. And scale. And scale. You think a G5 is gonna play Doom3 faster than an SGI with 16 9800 Pros working in parallel? How about a G5 versus an SGI machine with 128 processors, all of which have enough bandwidth? On the other hand, a G5 will handily beat an SGI at the same price point. The Apple machines are "better" per processor and per gig of RAM, but they max out WAY below where SGI goes.
Pick the tool for the job.
Re:Tezro VS. G5
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If you can handle the complex procedure of buying a mouse, you surly do not need a mac.
If you can handle the complex procedure of spell checking, you surely do not need a dictionary. Fucking retard.
Re:Tezro VS. G5
by
Alan+Partridge
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· Score: 4, Informative
So? SGI doesn't have Photoshop, Graphic Coverter, Illustrator, Freehand, Pro Tools, Logic, Xpress, InDesign, MS Office etc etc etc
If you want applications, I think MacOS can safely hold its own against IRIX.
In this hand, I have a pipe wrench. In the other hand, I have a can of baked beans.
They will both pound the nail in to some degree, maybe one blow will puncture the baked beans. Neither are a very good hammer, but they will both do that particular job.
Now say I have a clogged grease trap from cleaning up after a big home donut fiesta. Will the baked beans help me here?
Not to say that I expect (or would want) any Photoshop Bake Off style benchmarks, nor any compiler-specific hard benchmarks.
I'm just wondering what the outcome of an architectural face off would be.
Hell, it might even need to be purely hypothetical.
Re:Tezro VS. G5
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
They will both pound the nail in to some degree, maybe one blow will puncture the baked beans. Neither are a very good hammer, but they will both do that particular job.
Now say I have a clogged grease trap from cleaning up after a big home donut fiesta. Will the baked beans help me here?
aha... but if you're stuck on a desert island, I'd think that the can of baked beans would be more usefull...
With some of those apps, it makes a difference. With Photoshop, there is a difference, but it is not extreme. Photoshop 5 continues to let people do 99% of what photoshop 7 provides.
Hell, people are still using Photoshop 1.0 on mac, which reputedly will run on OSX under Classic, because it's tiny and fast and has the majority of features that people use on a day to day basis.
In any case, if you can afford a new and thus competitve SGI, you can afford to buy a Mac to set next to it. Or a PC, naturally, but the Mac runs Unix:D
-- "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Different platforms, different purposes. The G5 may erode a little of the low-end SGI market, but it can't compete on the high end. On the other hand, my wallet and my desk both want the G5, not the SGI.
Having used Photoshop since 1.0 came out, I call bullshit. 1.0 is primitive compared to even 5.0 - no layers, primitive color controls, limited support for multiple color spaces, etc. I would be surprised if anyone is using 1.0 for anything other than a xeroxed newsletter.
99% of the time when I use photoshop it's just to do a crop job. Most of the rest of the time, the only other thing I'm doing is adjusting brightness/contrast.
Photoshop 1.0 will do all these jobs just fine.
If you will return and carefully reread my brief comment I did not say that 1.0 would do the things 5.0 would do, I said it would do the things most people do when they load photoshop.
-- "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you are spending $3000+ then it better damn well come with a good three button mouse. The you-can-afford-another-mouse argument is baseless.
Re:Tezro VS. G5
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If you are only using Photoshop to crop and adjust brightness and contrast - you should be using a different program. There are cheap alternatives which are much better than running Photoshop 1.0 - hell, GIMP comes to mind. Besides no one who knows better would use "brightness and contrast" in Photoshop - if you care about not blatently shredding the luminosity distribution in the image you'd use the levels command at least. Curves is the best.
...then you don't need Photoshop. Why are you using such an expensive, capable application to crop pictures? You could get Corel Photo Paint free with a box of Cornflakes.
What's so fucking special about Flame? It's just a comping tool - the only guys in our facility who do much comping use Shake, AE, DS HD and Editbox FX. No tool is perfect - the power and versatility of Shake is BETTER than Flame, and you can always use Combustion on the Mac - my machine runs Commotion, which has SOME facilites that Flame can't touch - motion tracking in Commotion is fucking miles better, for example. Typography in fucking AE is better than Flame's etc etc etc.
Give me a Quantel iQ and a PowerMac G5 and I'll do more than a truckload of Floctanes (Flezro doesn't have the same ring, does it?).
CONGRATS ON BEING A TOTAL FUCKING MORON!!!!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Re:CONGRATS ON BEING A TOTAL FUCKING MORON!!!!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Thanks. I totally appreciate the sentiment. But really, I think I'm more of a fucktard than that total fucking moron, personally.
Abyss Nostalgia
by
nacturation
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I remember at university when SGI came around with their trailer full of cool boxes. This was around 1990 - 1991. The one thing I remember about that event was the real-time demonstration of the water tentacle effect from The Abyss.
No other machine could even come close to rendering this kind of thing real-time. These days, we're spoiled by high-end graphics cards costing only hundreds of dollars which eclipse what SGI could do back then by a factor of 10.
-- Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Re:Abyss Nostalgia
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
No other machine could even come close to rendering this kind of thing real-time.
It still can't. You're talking about real-time reflection and displacement mapping around 3D geometry composited onto a live scene with full antialiasing AT FILM RESOLUTION.
Can't do that with a PC. Any PC. At any price.
You can do it with an Onyx, though. Maybe even with a V12... though I doubt you could do it at 2K. HD-1080, definitely.
It would have been at the resolution of the screen they were doing the demo on.
-Alex
Re:Abyss Nostalgia
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It wasn't a live scene, and only included the water tentacle and, perhaps, a simple static background. You could control the shape of the face and the direction it pointed. And, as another poster mentioned, it was at monitor resolution. Yes, this can be done on PCs today.
Re:Abyss Nostalgia
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Sure, if you define the requirements down to something trivial, then yeah, you can do that with a PC. Hell, you can play Pong on a PC, too. So fucking what? The item of interest is what you can do with an Onyx that you CAN'T do with a PC.
My company paid 13,000 quid for an Indy back in 1994 and I was so impressed by the 3 juggling balls freebie that came with it. It was the first new computer anyone ever bought me. Sigh.
Re:Abyss Nostalgia
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The "item of interest" is the original post, ie: rendering a decent water tentacle, not some arbitrary "what can you do on an Onyx" trivia. It's not defining the requirements down, it's clarifying what the original post left out.
Let me guess, you're an SGI fanboy?
Re:Abyss Nostalgia
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Let me guess, you're an unemployed, overweight 20-something with a Winmodem and an Earthlink account?
I worked for an SGI dealer for a while...I remember we hauled about 5 boxes, including a Crimsion Reality Engine into the mail salesguy's house for the weekend before the show...now this guy was loaded formerly being a top of the line Chef, and his place was all finish in faux-rustic...weathered wood, etc. and scattered around this place were these coloured little boxes with a person or cluster of geeks around it. I wish I had photos! One of my fond memories of the days when Virtual Reality seemed just around the corner...
ttyl
Farrell
-- CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada
h
Re:Abyss Nostalgia
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Your Momma!
Re:Abyss Nostalgia
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Is that your impression of being clever, or is parroting a technique which runs in the family?
I helped write some software for a 3rd party vendor that was on display in the Magic Bus when it was here in Canada.
However, any time I was on the bus I played the airplane/helicopter flight sim on the Onyx with the pile of monitors hooked up to it. Much more fun:)
--
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Re:SGI Problems
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
my guess is youre using NFS to an SGI NFS server which is really buggy. NFS hangs really easily on SGIs for some insane reasons which SGI hasnt fixed yet.
Beaten By Consumer Hardware.
by
wsherman
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Now that stereo 3D is available with Linux and consumer hardware, the SGI offerings look a whole lot less impressive.
I looked into getting an SGI workstation a while back but since I wasn't a big corporation they treated me like I didn't exist. If SGI dropped their prices and marketed their stuff through something like Best Buy they'd have a chance of being more than a niche market supercomputer manufacturer but maybe that's all they care about anyway.
Re:Beaten By Consumer Hardware.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
a niche market supercomputer manufacturer but maybe that's all they care about anyway.
So... what was your first clue? like the fact that they brag about their high-bandwidth memory interconnect? or their support of 32 processors? Or that they support having a whole bunch of GPUs in the same machine?
Re:Beaten By Consumer Hardware.
by
gl4ss
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· Score: 3, Insightful
They are a niche company. Nobody would be buying sgi from best buy, heck, if it's hard to sell a linux box how hard it is to sell irix box? Especially when they aren't cheap either and joe has no use for it's features and the consumer competition is tough.
-- world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Re:Beaten By Consumer Hardware.
by
smitty45
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· Score: 1
yeah, I feel the same way about Aston Martin's...I looked into getting one a while back, but my local car dealership didn't have one.
if they would only drop their prices and marketed their stuff through the coupon booklet I get in the mail, then they'd have a chance of being more than a niche market highly-engineered premium luxury car manufacturer, but maybe that's all they care about anyway.
Re:Beaten By Consumer Hardware.
by
wsherman
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· Score: 1
Especially when they aren't cheap either and joe has no use for it's features
A lot of people do video editing and 3D stuff but you can't win if you don't play so, yeah, unless they're cheap and easily available the average consumer isn't going to be buying.
Reminds me of Unix in the late 80's and early 90's: it was so hard to get and expensive that someone had to go out a write a free version from scratch for it to get popular for home use.
Re:Beaten By Consumer Hardware.
by
leeet
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· Score: 2, Funny
Hmm.. ever tried buying a Mac at Bestbuy...? As far as SGI gear, I can imagine the poor (uneducated rep) asking you: "shall we charge your bestbuy credit card on this $24,999.95 order sir?"
Interested in an extended warranty plan for only $8900?
-- --
Leeeter than leet
Re:Beaten By Consumer Hardware.
by
drinkypoo
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· Score: 1
SGI has the most to fear from Opteron. What with hypertransport and built-in memory controllers, you could build a 31 (IIRC) processor NUMA system out of opterons; 8-way seems more likely to be popular. The bus is fast and so is the memory controller, but most importantly you don't need any special glue logic.
64 bit, currently doing what, 1.6 GHz or something? And supposedly scalable to 3GHz? It doesn't have as many GPRs as current MIPS processors but it has a whole lot more than x86 does... and they're available for a song, especially compared to any of the other 64 bit solutions available today except for the new PowerPC, which doesn't have the advantage of numerous HT links.
Of course, someone has to step up and start actually MAKING these machines before the Opteron can begin its global conquest.
-- "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Re:Beaten By Consumer Hardware.
by
gl4ss
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· Score: 1
On the contrary, the company which would likely do those opteron rigs to rival current sgi rigs in their game are sgi itself. Opteron is just a cpu still, and there aren't a lot of companies intrested in stepping to sgi's niche turf.
-- world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Any bigger pictures of the Onyx 4?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 4, Funny
It's just too hard to masturbate to these small images.
Re:Any bigger pictures of the Onyx 4?
by
dietlein
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· Score: 1
It's just too hard to masturbate to these small images.
Of course! This is SGI we're talking about! How about a 7.5MB TIFF?
Re:Nice...8086 Huh
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It was used in... I think the XT. The 8088 was used before the (older) 8086 because of cost, but the 8086 was used. I had an AT&T 8086 based DOS machine.
Re:SGI Problems
by
claudius0425
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· Score: 5, Funny
thank you, dear troll, for revealing your ineptitude so blatently. there is so such thing as a 3000 mhz MIPS chip, you (one is led to assume) are using a MIPS R3000, the second chip produced by MIPS, running at (at most) 33mhz. The R3000 is vintage 1990 at best. as to your sugggestion of 64gigs of ram, i will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant 64 megs. now, my little troll, go back to your cave.
Hmm, let's see a 8086 do realtime capturing and displaying of an ntsc video source on a 24bit 1280x1024 display. Now to be honest, 486 to low end Pentium would be a better comparison. Of course assuming these machines had some type of video capture board installed and a pretty kick butt scsi setup. Not the best things in the world for day to day tasks, but if you're doing the right thing, then they are quite nice (Indy less so since it's not as expandable, but one can create a pretty beefy I2. Not to mention the O2.
It's great to see SGI hanging in there, even though the industries in which they used to dominate have largely become the territory of cheap Linux PCs. While SGIs can no longer boast superior hardware of software, their brand still holds enough cachet for them to stick around a few more years a la Apple.
How many other PCs and Macs can handle hudreds of CPUs and 32 ATI gfx GPUs per system?
Re:Nice...8086 Huh
by
hamburger+lady
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· Score: 2, Informative
This one's becoming another slashodot classic. It now joins the company of legendary posts relating to natalie portman's hot grits, beowulf clusters, the profit mechanism (including ???), goatse snoop links, etc.
-- now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
Re:Nice...8086 Huh
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
No, the 8086 was never used in a PC product by IBM. Other manufs. used it though (like you said, AT&T was one of them). The PC/XT used the 8088, the AT the 80286.
Whats it used for? Really...
by
BrookHarty
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· Score: 0, Redundant
I saw the article and thought "Oh cool a new power workstation" but after looking at the specs, 700mhz cpu's and such, is it? Wouldnt the new Apple G5's with dual 2 ghz cpus crush it?
Other than driving multiple gfx displays, what is the main use for this workstation? I havnt used a SGI workstation, so share the info...
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
lederhosen
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· Score: 1
In CPU power, yes, but MacOSX can only address 4 gig of ram (I would guess only 2 gig per prosess).
If you want a fast cpu use an intel or AMD depending on what you want to do.
If you want a fast cpu that can address much mem use an opteron or itanic (itanic is fast on number crunching).
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
green+pizza
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· Score: 2, Informative
Other than driving multiple gfx displays, what is the main use for this workstation? I havnt used a SGI workstation, so share the info...
Depends on which machine you're talking about... the Tezero workstation or the Onyx4 visual supercomputer... two totally different products.
The Tezro replaces the Octane/Octane2. These days SGI workstations are usually used for software development for the big iron, HD video work, and for smaller-scale data crunching. Octane2 and now Tezro both have pretty amazing HD abilities, due mostly to the wicked fast architecture. These usually run specialized apps such as Discreet Flame or IFX Piranha. Other big data companies like these workstations for similar reasons. GE Medical uses Fuel (Tezro's little brother) workstations to collect and display 3D data from MRI scanners.
99.999% of the population has no need for an SGI... but there are folks out there that have tasks that utilize such huge amounts of data and need as little latency as possible... for these folks there is the mighty expensive SGI kit.
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
BWJones
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I saw the article and thought "Oh cool a new power workstation" but after looking at the specs, 700mhz cpu's and such, is it? Wouldnt the new Apple G5's with dual 2 ghz cpus crush it?
Well, I have some history with using SGI Octanes and O2's, and I would say that for my needs, there is absolutely no need for the SGI's anymore. The G5 can address 8GB of RAM, it can support multiple displays, as just about every Mac since 1987 has been able to do. (you are only limited by the number of available PCI slots or back when things were NUBUS, NUBUS slots).
In fact, the G5 has many of the technologies that made the Octanes so tasty back in their time. (Completely separate busses for memory, storage, IO etc....), even clustering is possible with the G5's, so if the software is available, I will save my $$'s and go for the better solution, which is the G5.
All of that said, there may be some that can benefit greatly from the SGI's, particularly those in rendering since that is apparently the Tezro's strongpoint (from looking at the specs). Too bad they stuck it with that awful name.
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
mixmasta
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· Score: 1
Well, yeah, it probably would....
if it existed!
The sgi workstations have been pushing 64 for 5-10 years, there is something to say for maturity. The terzo also holds 4 cpu's (and probably faster i/o) which would outpace the mac by quite a bit.
Personally, I would take either.
--
#6495ED - cornflower blue
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
CyberKnet
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What are you comparing those Mhz to? You can't compare it (Mhz rating) to a Motorola PowerPC chip, or an Intel x86 / IA-64 / ARM chip, or an AMD x86/x86-64 chip.... they're not the same architecture.
Even if it was the same architecture, you'd have to compare IPC instead of Mhz. With different architectures, even that is a dicey comparison...
Apples and Oranges, my friend. You can't compare flavor, only nutritional information.
-- Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
nacs
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· Score: 2, Informative
Actually the new G5s can support and address 8GB ram total.
-- "I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The G5 Macs can addression 8gig physical RAM and they're a 64bit CPU, so I suspect significantly more VM space - though it may not be the full 64bit's worth, but they, on an 8gig system, a max of 36bits addr space would probably be fine.
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
TheSunborn
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· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, but each TASK can still only use 4GB of ram. (OR use a hack similary to the Intel Xeon but that is ugly)
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
AchilleTalon
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· Score: 1
Maybe it would fit well into a real flight simulator, or to visualize huge data from seismic analysis, or computational-fluid dynamics, or...
Maybe you just reach the upper-bound limit of your own brain-CPU dedicated to imagination?
-- Achille Talon
Hop!
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Fucking moron moderators, this guy posted within the first 20 posts. And has people who posted multiple +1 answers. Get a fucking clue.
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yes, but each TASK can still only use 4GB of ram.
Right. That's what 32-bit computing means.
If you need more than 4 GB of RAM, recompile your application with the -mpowerpc64 flag. Poof. LP64 all the way, baby. Up to 4 TB of RAM on the 970, more on future processors in the PowerPC64 family.
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Well, I have some history with using SGI Octanes and O2's, and I would say that for my needs, there is absolutely no need for the SGI's anymore.
Yawn. When you come down from your little fantasy trip, let us know, won't you?
Sit down at an Octane 2 running Flame or Smoke. Everything is real-time. Everything. Multiple layers, DVE, color correction, time warping, you name it. All at once. Real time.
Now do that an a G5. Any G5. Go ahead, I'll wait.
And the Tezro 2p is going to be about 20% faster than an Octane 2. And the Tezro takes up to 4 processors for only about 10% more than the 2p model.
Sorry to reality-check you like this, but you're just full of shit, and I hate to see otherwise intelligent people make asses of themselves.
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
TheSunborn
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· Score: 1
But THAT require a 64bit os. What use is it that your application use 64bit pointers if all the pointers you get from the os is only 32bit?
Besides using the -mpowerpc64bit flag does NOT allow your compiler to use 64 bit pointers with any current version of MacOS/gcc. What -mpowerpc64does is that it allows gcc to generate native 64bit ppc code to your long long variables.
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
But THAT require a 64bit os.
You're an idiot.
What use is it that your application use 64bit pointers if all the pointers you get from the os is only 32bit?
In LP64 mode, all pointers, including those returned by system calls (which is what "get from the OS" means), are 64 bits wide. That's what LP64 means. The PowerPC64 architecture switches dynamically between ILP32 and LP64. In ILP32, ints, longs, and pointers are all 32 bits wide. In LP64 mode, ints are 32 bits, while longs and pointers are 64 bits. The switch happens automatically, on the fly.
Besides using the -mpowerpc64bit flag does NOT allow your compiler to use 64 bit pointers with any current version of MacOS/gcc.
Go read your documentation again, you buffoon.
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
TheSunborn
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· Score: 1
Let's see what Apple say about -mpowerpc
(from: http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2086.htm l )
-mcpu=970 This allows the compiler to use instructions only available on the G5 (also known as 970) processor.
-mpowerpc64 In combination with the above flags, this flag tells the compiler to enable the G5's native 64-bit long long support for greatly enhanced performance when working with long longs. At times, the -force_cpusubtype_ALL flag may also be needed.
See it says native 64-bit for long long. Nothing about pointers. I have been unable to find ANY reference to 64bit pointers anyware at developers.apple.com or other places talking about mac G5.
So while it might be posible to generate code with 64 bit pointers, i don't think malloc will ever give you a pointer abowe 4G.
So I would be glad to have any reference to any
documentation/story where ANYONE say they use 64bit memory references with MacOS X10.2.7 or 10.3
You might notice that the photoshop they used to demo the G5 only had 32bit pointers and used some bridge hardware(segments of a kind) to map the memory similary(but not as hacked as the Intel Xeon chip)
Martin
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You still missed it. It's in the GCC3.3 release notes. Go read again, and this time make sure you read THE WHOLE THING before posting.
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
TheSunborn
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· Score: 1
Could you please provide an url?
Martin
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
No, moron. The GCC3.3 release notes are on YOUR OWN FUCKING MACHINE, under/Developer/Documentation.
Geez.
Re:Whats it used for? Really...
by
TheSunborn
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· Score: 1
Well the problem is that my Mac don't have gcc installed. The only MacOS development i do is in Java. And I really don't want to install xx MB just to get the release notes for gcc. The release notes for gcc 3.3 from gnu does only mention 64 bit powerpc suported by aix.
Ofcause apple might have made their own modifications to gcc 3.3 and then released that compiler as gcc 3.3
I even did a google search on 64bit pointers macos but the only thing I found were descriptions about how to use more then 4G of ram with 32bit pointers.
So if Apple does allow applications to use more then 4GB address space they really have hidden the fact for many people. see for example: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id= 3981 http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/3160 0.html
but if you could post your gcc 3.3 release note I wolud be happy.
As sands through the hourglass, these are the trolls of our lives. . .
-- I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Re:Nice...8086 Huh
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
(since the PC never used a 8086 chip)?
Is that only in your alternate universe? Although the 8088 was cheaper and used first by IBM they did use the 8086 in the PS/2 model 25 and model 30 in 1987.
The new tezro box looks like the Macintosh "command" key icon extruded into 3d. Very interesting... I would hope that someday these will make really sweet micro-fridge mod cases!
Re:SGI Problems
by
Axynter
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Heh, when was the last time you checked your hard disk for errors? Did you contact SGI about these problems? If you are assuming that these are OS/hardware limitations, then you're an idiot.
Even a gazillion teraflops computer will do dumb things if so instructed.
Re:Nice...8086 Huh
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Since when does "Personal Computer" mean only a computer built by IBM and not its 100% clones? I think Nom du Keyboard spoke without thinking.
Re:Nice...8086 Huh
by
The+Mayor
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· Score: 2, Informative
That is, it was never used in a PC product by IBM unless you consider the IBM PS/2 Model 25 and Model 30 IBM computers. If that is the case, then the 8086 was used in PC products from IBM.
Oh, maybe you mean one of the PC branded computers perhaps? Like the PC/XT or PC/AT? OK. Maybe you are right. But I think that is splitting hairs.
I guess the geeks don't hang out on/. as they once did. The original IBM Personal Computer (circa 1981 - 1983) used the Intel 8088 chip, not the 8086. Although related, the 8088 is a distinct chip that uses an 8-bit (as opposed to 16-bit) instruction/data bus and intergrates a few additional features that allow for 5 less glue logic chips, resulting in lower manufacturing costs in addition to the 8-bit expansion slots being cheaper.
Although IBM considered upgrading the design to the 80186 when it appeared that Intel could not deliver the 286 chip on schedule, they wisely skipped that step and the PC-AT first appeared with a 6MHz 80286 processor -- crippled addressing and all.
Now for extra points, what clock-rate did the original IBM PC operate at, and why?
-- "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm sure I still own an IBM PS/2 Model 30 (1987), that uses an Intel 8086 (16 bit bus).
I concede your point, since I was referring to original PCs, the overwhelming number coming with 8088 chips. I also feel sorry for any PS/2 owners of models 25 or 30, which were essentially orphan machines on the day they were released. Their only advantage was to still use the ISA bus, rather than Microchannel.
-- "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
~1.4something MHz, because that was the frequency of the crystals used to sync NTSC TV transmissions, so you could buy the crystals by the boatload
Actually, 4.77MHz, which allowed relatively easy division to the 3.58MHz color burst signal of NTSC. In addition, even through 8086 chips were running up to 8MHz at the time, the 8087 math coprocessor topped out at 5MHz and had to be sync-locked with the processor. Also memory was better accomodated at 4.77MHz.
-- "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Re:What?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Actually, 4.77MHz, which allowed relatively easy division to the 3.58MHz color burst signal of NTSC.
The actual crystals were 14.32... MHz -
four times the NTSC subcarrier, and cheaply
available due to their use in home VCRs.
This was divided by three to give the 4.77 MHz
CPU clock.
It was further divided by four to give the 1.193 MHz clock for the main timer chip - a frequency
still in use today.
Simon
Re:Multigen creator
by
Fulcrum+of+Evil
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The "Multigen Creator" software they come with for 3-d rendering absolutely sucks and it's ridiculously slow when you have more then 20 polygons on the screen too. This is on an 02.
The O2 was new around 1997 (6 years ago) and was pitched as a lowend 'affordable' computer. It has shared video ram for chrissakes!
-- "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala,
it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
So where can I buy the machine?
by
Cthefuture
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
All I see it "contact a sales rep" crap. T-e-l-e-p-h-o-n-e, what's that? Fill out a form so you can get back with me if I'm a good enough customer?
What are the prices?
Why can't I just order up a couple machines off their web pages?
I was going to order 3 or 4 machines for a graphics project ohwell... Sorry SGI, you lose 'cause I couldn't get pricing information for even order the machines. Guess I'll stick with Dell or Apple.
(I'm being sarcastic, but I think I made my point)
-- The ratio of people to cake is too big
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
Tyler+Eaves
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· Score: 3, Informative
No, you didn't, actually. SGI does not market to consumers or small businesses. SGI markets to corportations and institutions. The worlds where the purchase order is king.
-- TODO: Something witty here...
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
Dominic_Mazzoni
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· Score: 4, Informative
All I see it "contact a sales rep" crap. T-e-l-e-p-h-o-n-e, what's that? Fill out a form so you can get back with me if I'm a good enough customer?
What are the prices?
Why can't I just order up a couple machines off their web pages?
I was going to order 3 or 4 machines for a graphics project ohwell... Sorry SGI, you lose 'cause I couldn't get pricing information for even order the machines. Guess I'll stick with Dell or Apple.
(I'm being sarcastic, but I think I made my point)
SGI lost the battle for low-end machines long ago. Nobody in their right mind is purchasing low-end SGIs unless they already have a lab full of high-end ones and simply want compatibility - in which case they already have an established relationship with SGI.
The point is that if you want to render 3-D graphics on a wall of 36 LCD displays in a 6x6 grid, fed from a 2-TB server of image data, you can't buy Dell or Apple. You can't even put together a Linux box to do that. SGI is simply the only game in town that builds machines with graphics pipes that big.
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
Bo+Diddly+Squat
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, and that has worked so well, hasn't it ? Sgi has been bleeding money for years now and there is still no end in sight to their problems and money is running out.
Sgi should drop their arrogant attitude and start caring about anyone who wants to buy their stuff.
Having a web store is quite normal these days and I don't understand why Sgi doesn't have one.
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
Ella+the+Cat
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· Score: 1
I once saw an SGI for retail sale (or so I assumed, I can't read Japanese) over the counter in Akihabara (sp) in Tokyo back in 1999. I took a photo like only a geek would...
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Ever heard of PC Clusters? A great number of VR and scientific visualisation labs are switching to those since they provide similar performances to Onyx and are far cheaper.
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Your bile is misplaced. You can't get a Tezro for less than five figures, US dollars. There's no point in putting the price on the web page. Nobody who would buy one off the web site can afford one, and no one who can afford one cares about the web site.
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
The+Creator
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· Score: 1
Well, show us the damn photo!!
--
FRA: STFU GTFO
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Sorry SGI, you lose 'cause I couldn't get pricing information for even order the machines.
If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Are you serious? We are talking about latency and bandwidth at the north south bridge level and you want to introduce 100BT and IP?
Typing it into the little white box a million times won't make it true, you ignorant asshat.
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
morcheeba
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· Score: 1
I think that Athlon, Nvidia, and RH7.3 is good enough for a 7x7 LCD grid @ NASA. It may require more software work, and may not be able to handle flinging data around internally as well, but it'll cost a whole lot less and still provide some astounding graphics.
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
chancycat
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· Score: 1
FWIW: HP will sell you a rack of pre-configured systems for doing such visulization arrays, or video multiplexing onto one screen. They use high-end NVidia gear within the Linux servers. It is a quiet program of HP's.
-- Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Probably one of their ill-fated WinTel machines. They were pretty much dumped into various retail channels after they failed to sell.
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
salesgeek
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· Score: 1
Sgi should drop their arrogant attitude and start caring about anyone who wants to buy their stuff. Actually, all customers are not created equal. If you are a business, you have to sell your product into a profitable market. Small companies don't have the resources to hire SGI grade users, support staff or afford the software and service contracts that SGI needs to sell to be profitable, or for that matter to survive in their low volume market. Then you have cost of sales. Because of SGI's complexity and price, it takes about the same time, effort, travel etc to sell 25 or 100 boxes to a big company as it does one to a small company.
Ultimately, SGI is not equiped to satisfy the demands of small business on the support, training and repair side either. So they go where they can make money. Back in the day the workstation manufacturers would outsource the support and sales function by using distribution to sell their systems.
$G
-- -- $G
Re:So where can I buy the machine?
by
Ella+the+Cat
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· Score: 1
http://www.shevek.f9.co.uk/dscf55e/sgi.jpg
Re:SGI Problems
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It now joins the company of legendary posts relating to natalie portman's hot grits, beowulf clusters, the profit mechanism (including ???), goatse snoop links, etc.
You forgot posts about the tragic death of noted author Stephen King at his cabin in Maine. You can't deny the contribution that those posts have made to Slashdot history.
Re:Multigen creator
by
Space+cowboy
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You realise you're comparing to an SGI that's maybe 6 years old, yes ?
Show me a PC from 6 years ago that could overlay video onto surfaces with special effects (warp, transform, etc.). Now rotate a cube with 6 of these video surfaces running in parallel (one per face) at any time.
"This hardware sucks because the program's crap" is almost never a good argument. Perhaps there's a mismatch. Perhaps the program is crap, but the hardware is cool. Perhaps.... (you get the idea)...
SGI's in general tend to be slow CPU's with massive internal bandwidth for throwing data around, and massively fast graphics for the day. If you're running a cpu-intensive program, then Intel is probably for you. If you want a graphics/media workstation, SGI is the way to go. Surprise, the Post/Film industry likes SGI's. Discreet Logic Flame/Inferno is still the dominant s/w, and it's head and shoulders above the rest.
Simon.
-- Physicists get Hadrons!
Re:SGI Problems
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various SGI...
Could it be as long as your laundry list of mental and social problems?
Infinite Reality 4 has 1 GB of texture ram and 10 GB of frame buffer memory... so it doe have its advantages for a few specific users. But for the most part, using ATI gfx GPUs (working either independently or in parallel) makes far more sense than having SGI use the last of their resources to fight the ATI/NVIDIA 3D war.
SGI's strengths are with architecture and I/O. ATI's strenghts are in pixel and polygon pumps. Looks like a perfect union to me.
True, ATI and Nvidia have a complete army of engineers devoting their entire work on a few chips. A computer such as this one requires many chips and it would be quite hard to compete with ATi unless you spend/invest the same amount of money. Why reinvent the wheel?
What ATI need's is an army working on their drivers.
My favorite is when trying to install the driver for an ATI card (only card in the system) the program telling you that "You do not have an ATI card installed."
Know what - it's right now - I no longer have an ATI card installed.
Then why do Sun and IBM continue to make microprocessors? Shouldn't they outsource to Intel and AMD? It would save them a ton of dollars in R&D. The top performing processors are already Intel or AMD silicon.
Different bands have differentiating features that matter. Microprocessors are quickly becoming a homogeneous resource (through virtualization technology it doesn't matter what the underlying ISA is). They are a commodity. Easily replaced. Akin to DRAM. Computer vendors don't design custom DRAM anymore. I say this as someone that gets paid to design microporcesors.
Bands are not commodities. You cannot substitute one band for another easily.
In 5-10 years, it will become too expensive to support a microprocessor design division. Only Intel or some other large semiconductor player will be able to sustain this kind of investment. IBM certainly could do it. Sun has no chance.
Re:SGI Problems
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Interesting? This is a blatant troll adapted from the Apple board here.
Obviously, if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
And that's the real problem with this sort of GORGEOUS piece of hardware -- on price points, a lot of businesses will just make their designers work on a Mac. And a good many more will decide that Macs are too pricey themselves & have their designers working on souped-up Windows boxes.
This is really unfortunately, but it's the way it is. I think what my own staff artist might be doing on an SGI workstation, but then I think what else we'd be doing without if we got him one:-(
-- "Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
I had a load of research money for purchasing an SGI a couple of years ago. SGI made it very difficult to buy from them. Generally they will put you in contact with a reseller, and then you get quotes from them. This seemed to take awhile and was awkward. I just decided not to buy from them after a while. I am pretty happy with OpenGL performance on my Mac, and the price/performance of an SGI is really not that good. We'll see what SGI has at SIGGRAPH this year. I can't believe they haven't tanked yet.
Sun would not be who they are today if SGI did not sell their products at such a high price tag. SGI has always been rediculously expensive.
Sun boxes were for those who wanted SGI but their departments would not let them buy it. Today they make expensive systems as well but a decade ago sun was the Honda while SGI was the Porshe.
The cheapest SGI is what, 15-20k? The cheapest sun blade is about 2-3k with a decent graphics card.
Less than 1/100th of the current price, 6 years from now on eBay. This new wave of products should shortly allow me to upgrade from my R10K Indigo^2 to a R12K based box for a song.
Re:I need one of those about like I need a semi tr
by
rhombic
·
· Score: 2, Informative
SGI has always had wild colored cases, weird form factors, etc. Check out the original indigos (big blue boat anchor-style cases), the sweet purple indigo2s, the octane with the light stripe in the front, or the funky little round O2 (hate that machine, can't balance a coffee cup on top). Weird cases are nothing new for SGIs-- not usually as pretty as the apple cases, but they always catch people's attention. And the old CRT monitors can be really, really great-- of course, they weigh 100 lbs each and take up your entire desk, but working on a 24" superwide CRT is true bliss...
-- 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Re:Thoughts on SGI
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Thats a good point.
The reason why that the SGI has maintained a niche in the high performance CAD market was due to its clever memory architechture and blisteringly fast 2D graphics chipset.
It's a little more obvious than that --- it's a cut-and-paste Mac troll with all references to the Power Mac 8600/300 replaced with SGI. He missed the reference to BBEdit Lite, the cut-down free version of a great Mac text editor.
Re:SGI Problems
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I agree 100%. This is soon becoming another classic. Even more classic is the fact that few currently realizes this:
30% voted this funny (got it) 40% voted this troll (got it - hated it) 30% voted this interesting (oolala!)
And I haven't even got to the replies...
80 processors... and 34 GPUs!
by
green+pizza
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· Score: 1
Check out the press release... 34 gfx pipes (ATI GPUs) in that machine!
Hey... someone mod this post's parent up. The AC is right, this is nearly a verbatim post from the apple forum, and is obviously a troll.
Re:Nice...8086 Huh
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Oh, maybe you mean one of the PC branded computers perhaps? Like the PC/XT or PC/AT? OK. Maybe you are right. But I think that is splitting hairs.
Yes, I was referring specifically to the PC/XT/AT line (notice big PC, not little pc). After all, who counts the PS/2's anyway;) Esp now when 99% of people you say PS/2 to will think Sony long before they think IBM.
Re:SGI Problems
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
Some older SGIs develop checksum errors on the SCSI bus, which can put a damper on disk throughput (as you might imagine). SGI offers a free replacement kit.
So does this mean...
by
tsetem
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· Score: 4, Funny
Re:I need one of those about like I need a semi tr
by
drix
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Sorta like if White Freightliner started slapping Lamborghini-made bodies on their trucks.
What the hell's wrong with that? Add more beauty to the world. No one loses. My day is considerably brightened when I look in the rearview and see a 360 Modena smiling back. A 6'x6' Mack truck radiator grille, OTOH, is a different story. And workhorses (the animals), by the way, have a beauty of power and form all their own. Compare with the BBBB (big, boring, beige box), which has... nothing pretty about it at all. Any deviation is a positive step.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
How about a Silicone Graphics (sic) PC case mod?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You also failed to mention OGG THE OPENSOURCE CAVEMAN, meept(??), or the Jon Katz hate posts.
Those were the days.
Re:SGI Problems
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
For fsck sake, yet another repost of http://www.kottke.org/98/11/
Re:Multigen creator
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Hrm, we have a couple of SGIs at work, and I was actually kind of surprised at how slow and crapy they were. The "Multigen Creator" software they come with for 3-d rendering absolutely sucks and it's ridiculously slow when you have more then 20 polygons on the screen too. This is on an 02.
You do realize that the O2 is an old machine which SGI stopped supporting sometime last year don't you? I am taking a class on advanced topics in computer graphics programming in a lab filled with SGI machines. The O2's are the most numerous and slowest of the bunch. The other SGI machines are faster, but I usually don't get to the lab in time to log onto one of them so I can't give an objective comparrison to linux and windows perfomance on them. I have noticed that openGL animations run much faster on these machines than the O2's. I don't know how the latest SGI machines stack up to Linux and Apple solutions for 3d modeling and animation as used in movies and games, but it certainly seems a better solution for scientific visualization work.
Moderators! Mod parent up!
by
invalid_user
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· Score: 1
Don't let your passion for Mac overwhelm your sense of moderative responsibilty.
This is funny as hell. Where has this guy been all this time?
A Very Odd Datasheet. Where's the processor?
by
Nova+Express
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I actually downloaded the datasheet for the "Silicon Graphics Onyx4 Ultimate Vision Family," and found it a very curious document indeed. It has some interesting hard facts about the system (OpenGL 1.4, 8-32 graphic processor pipes on the "Extreme," up to 8 GB of graphic memory (sweet!), etc.), but what I was looking was the type and speed of the processors used. So I kept looking.
And looking.
And looking.
It's not there.
SGI's own datasheet for the Onyx4 Family doesn't tell you what processor it runs! Others in the thread have said it uses MIPS chips, but the word "MIPS" never appears in the datasheet (nor "RISC," for that matter). It tells you how many processors the system uses, but not what they are or how fast they are.
This is not just odd; for a datasheet, it's nearly unprecedented. Only three explanations for this abscence occur to me:
They have the world's most incompetent technical writers. (Very unlikely.)
They're actually ashamed of their CPU, and don't want to tell you what it is or how fast in runs. (Most likely.)
They're desperately working behind the scenes to port their software to commodity hardware (mostly likely x86, but the 970/G5 might be a smarter choice). (Unlikely, but not impossible.)
I have no idea how fast the current generation of MIPS chips are (I think the last time I saw a benchmark, they were slower than Alphas, which tells you it was back when they were still benchmarking Alphas rather than letting them die a quiet and undeserved death), but the fact that SGI isn't even willing to mention them in their datasheet doesn't give me confidence.
-- Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Re:A Very Odd Datasheet. Where's the processor?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
well, Maybe these things are soon going to be packaged with the Itanum2?
Re:A Very Odd Datasheet. Where's the processor?
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dutky
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I noticed that too (but you beat me to the post). I think that there is another explanation, however:
The Onyx4 either currently is, or will soon be, based on the Itanium rather than the MIPS. HP did something simlar with their recent platforms (shipped with PA-RISC but were plug-compatible with Itanium).
The marketing-speak "Industry Leading Processors" is awfully suspicious. The sad part is, SGI doesn't have any good options:
They already discredited the MIPS, so they can't admit to using that.
They can't brag about the Itanium, since it's not doing all that stellarly well (not, at least, as well as it was hyped to do).
They can't transition to x86, since they already tried that once and it was a disaster.
They can't transition to some other platform, since they haven't got any residual credability with which to fund such a move (anyone still using SGIs would rather jump ship entirely).
SGI has tried just about every dumb trick in the book (most pioneered by DEC) to find some way to move from thier ever shrinking niche (data visualization and computer animation) to something broader and more profitable. At each step along the way they have annoyed and alienated their loyal customers.
Re:A Very Odd Datasheet. Where's the processor?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Perhaps they should give IBM a call and order a a few 970s?
Re:A Very Odd Datasheet. Where's the processor?
by
RageEX
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· Score: 2, Informative
Where did you get that bullet point from?
The 'at a glance' datasheet specifies MIPS R16000 CPUs. From http://www.sgi.com/visualization/onyx4/ataglance.p df
Silicon Graphics Onyx4 UltimateVision System Key Specifications Incredibly compact form factors - 8 CPUs and 4 pipes in an under-the-desk form factor (20"H x 12"W x 34"D) - 16 CPUs and 8 pipes in a deskside configuration 17U high - 32 CPUs and 24 pipes in a single 39U rack! Specifically designed for advanced display environments - Able to drive a 2 x 9M pixel LCD displays at a power user price point - Breathtaking fidelity, power, and interactivity on over 100M pixels of display Tremendous system infrastructure using the SGI® NUMA scalable architecture: - Up to 32 graphics pipes per system - Up to 64 advanced MIPS® CPUs per system - Up to 128GB of high-performance system memory - Up to 64 PCI-X slots delivery unparalleled network and storage bandwidth - Support for dozens of professional audio and video streams - SGI® IRIX® 6.5.20 64-bit operating system with a heterogeneous SAN filesystem - Larger systems possible through custom bids
Re:A Very Odd Datasheet. Where's the processor?
by
RageEX
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· Score: 1
You didn't look hard enough, though one shouldn't have to look hard for such info.
Download the 'Onyx4 At A Glance' PDF, it mentions MIPS in there.
SGI often skimps on many details. Some possible reasons:
1. The extreme modularity of their systems means they assume you already know certain specs. An 'Onyx4' is really just an 'Onyx350' with this new graphics option (UltimateVision) and a new color scheme. The real news is the new ATI-based graphics option. 2. They intend to sell both MIPS (Origin) and Itanium2 (Altix) systems with this new graphics option and call the product 'Onyx4' so they leave most of the website literature open-ended. 3. They will shortly release their new R18000 CPU so why not leave the website docs open-ended. 4. They're SGI, they don't give a shit about jerks cruising the website, and they only care about multi-million dollar orders, so why go to the trouble of making everything clear and simple for people who aren't your customers?
Re:U R GAY AND YOUR SITE SUCKS NIGGER COCK
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yuo = teh g4y!11!
OMFG I c4n't bele1ve I s4id that! LOLOLOL11!!11
You failed at making your point
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
You weren't really going to buy one but you would like them to have a webstore? Why?
SGIs are not impulse items. You don't get a bug up your ass to plunk down for a $30000 workstation (unless you are some snotty rich kid who buys it just to have it). When you contact SGI you can often get deals out of the sales rep on hardware, software, bulk orders, etc. Sun is the same way (on high end servers), and Apple and can be to an extent as well.
Its like this for a reason.
Re:You failed at making your point
by
lga
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· Score: 1
A webstore is probably unneccasary for the high end SGI stuff, but why can't I buy one of the low end SGI's online? The website could sell accessories like cables, CD drives, monitors and CD media sets, even minor CPU and RAM upgrades, as well as their refurbished older workstations. A second user Octane 2 might just be in my price range - why can't I buy it online?
I just vaguely remember those days. I never really read anything written by JonKatz, but remember those hate posts all over the damn place.
However, I have no idea about OGG THE OPENSOURCE CAVEMAN and meept. Must be before my time. Or they might not have been too big.
-- now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
Re:How about a Silicone Graphics (sic) PC case mod
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
or this one
http://quickwired.com/kallahar/indigo2/
A lot of money
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
$20k for the base tezro (10-15k for the top of the line in orders of 10 or more)
$40k for the onyx (25k in orders of 10 more. Bulk discounts rock!)
PS Boxen is not a valid term. It's BoxeS
Re:A lot of money
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Just for the record, this fine fellow is an idiot. His pricing information is completely out of line. The Tezro and Onyx numbers are far too low, and SGI doesn't offer "bulk discounts." (In fact, every machine SGI sells is discounted 20-30% off of list price. That's just how they do business.)
He was right about "boxen" though. That's a typo at best.
Say it ain't so! I've been told now for three years that it was Linux doing all of the special effects for LOTR, and now you tell me that IRIX was part of it!
Does this mean... that... Linux can't... do everything? Noooo!
-- A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The 80186 (and its 8-bit version the 80188) was also used in a few computers like the original Gateway Handbook and the Mindset PC. Still, probably much, much rarer than 8086 based machines.
-- Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Hmm, let's see a 8086 do realtime capturing and displaying of an ntsc video source on a 24bit 1280x1024 display.
no problem... give me a scsi card and a hardware capture card... I know a 286 can do it, so get a 8 bit scsi card and I'll show you.
the computer is nothing more than a simple way of making the good powerful hardware talk to each other. Hell most high end capture cards are NOT PCI/ISA/or whatever but they are SCSI. same with the high end Video output cards. and using them takes almost no processing power.
This is how I stream 48 DIFFERENT dvd quality mpeg2 files out to NTSC video at the same time on a pentium 133 motherboard with 32 meg of ram on it running NT 3.51... simple scsi commands to high end hardware.
the computer has nothing to do with what is getting done except for making it easier to install the newest command software.
-- Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You make a good point
by
Performer+Guy
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's a sad fact that SGI sales are embarrassingly bad. I used to work for SGI, while I was still there I knew ex-SGI employees who tried to buy machines for REAL projects and couldn't, it was just too difficult with the whole sales rep runaround. Very frustrating! Don't believe me? Call them up and tell them you want to buy an Onyx4 system. You WILL get the runaround, especially if you want a few technical details or need to discuss configuration options. They couldn't sell popcorn in a cinema lobby.
While the Tezro is a pretty impressive looking workstation, I'm really wondering what sort of market SGI has anymore. The workhorse for the heavy 3D graphics work is the VPro V12 and the 2D video is handled by the DMediaPro expansion card. Anymore a high bandwidth high capacity 2D or 3D video accelerator is not something that necessitates a über-expensive SGI workstation. That same equipment or an equivilent could be stuck in say a G5 PowerMac or Opteron based workstation. Both would be far less expensive in initial cost and depending on your existing infrastructure have a far lower TCO and a higher return on the investment.
SGI is again looking it seems only at their existing customers. The Tezro is pretty impressive when you sit it next to your old O2 or Octane but when compared to the latest and greatest from competitors it looks a little lacking. SGI now is in the position Apple was in several years ago. They're catering to their existing yet shrinking customer base rather than the new blood that they really need to be a serious player again.
Hell they would do okay with some of their old blood they've been losing steadily. Not everyone is apt to drop $20,000 on a workstation only to need another couple thousand in HD video accelerators to get something done. They've been switching to Windows and Mac solutions because of SGI's premium price. Five workstations that can each do the same HD work as your one SGI is a much better deal for the price.
I've been a huge fan of SGI since the first time I sat down at an O2. Their systems at the time beat the crap out of anything any PC vendor offered. Now $10k work of PC workstation equipment and software will do what $50k work of SGI equipment and software will do. It is nice to see the old logo on their new machines but I'm more interested in seeing some of the old value on the new machines.
-- I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Re:2000th Post Troll
by
nurble
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· Score: 3, Informative
I use flame and inferno on octane and onyx respectively, and I can say that macintoshes (though I love them dearly) come nowhere near the realtime performance of SGI machines. It's not the CPU, or even the graphics processing, really, it's the bandwidth of the system. The fact that they can now play 2k 12bit images in real time. If you're sitting in a room with a director or an ad agency, you want to hit an image and see it, not wait for the thing to load into memory so you can play it. I can run an image through a maze of plugins and modules and have a viewable render in a few seconds. Macs and PCs have made great strides in playback and graphics power, but still don't move pictures through their architecture nearly as efficiently.
It's not the CPU, or even the graphics processing, really, it's the bandwidth of the system.
On the workstation end, he was referring to the G5, with a dual 1GHz hypertransport bus and 2.1 GB/s vs. 1.6 (Tezro) graphics bandwidth and 6.4 GB/s vs. 3.2 memory bandwidth.
In depth analysis of the new machines
by
nurble
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· Score: 3, Informative
can be found here. Written by the former hardware guru for discreet, it pretty much spells out what these machines are up to and how they compare to their predecessors. I'm no hardware guy, but it made decent sense to me. have at it!
Re:In depth analysis of the new machines
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AveryT
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· Score: 1
Written by the former hardware guru for discreet, it pretty much spells out what these machines are up to and how they compare to their predecessors.
I can vouch for that. JFP knows his SGIs inside and out. This is the real deal.
Re:In depth analysis of the new machines
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nurble
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· Score: 1
did i mention that fxguide was running on a powerbook G4 and might not be up to the stress of a slashdot posting?
hmm. clearly not. oops.
Its the Software that's expensive...
by
cutecub
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I used to work for SGI and also did freelance video animation ( a very long time ago ) on an SGI Indy.
As an individual, the biggest problem I encountered wasn't the cost of the SGI system (a one-time cost), it was the cost of the system software and drivers.
OS upgrades were expensive.
Print drivers were expensive.
Networking options were expensive.
The compilers were unbundled.
Most of the software Open Source geeks nowadays take for granted as being free, cheap, and readily available was expensive and exotic on the SGI.
I ultimately switched to a high-end Macintosh. Today, the Mac is an even more compelling alternative to a low-end SGI for media production.
I don't know about SGI's other niches, such as Scientific Visualization, but I would expect high-end PCs to have the edge over low-end SGIs in other areas.
When I worked at SGI (1998) everything had weird color schemes, the walls, the furniture, everything. And strange architecture too. Though the strangest set of buildings just got subleased to Google. Which I guess is about getting away from their "Star Wars" image.
Which is they rebranded in 1998 to make the company logo the letters sgi with the bottoms cut off, as if they were appearing over the horizon. (New motto: "The Solution is in Sight!") But I guess that's even more obscure then the original logo, because now they just use the three letters.
And the original logo is very obscure. It's not a bug! It's the Chrome Cube! The whole point being that you need an SGI workstation to render the damn thing. But nobody ever got that. So sad!
I always saw it as a chrome cube, I see it the other way, and dont' get how anyone can see it as a bug, it is susposed to look at cool and modern, right?
a bug is also the term for the small logo in the corner of a sheet of glass.. usually contains a manufacturer logo and some description of the glass.. whether it is tempered or not, etc. it doesn't look like a bug.. but if you order a sheet of glass with or without a bug, the salesperson will know what you are talking about.
I still laugh whenever I select a screensaver or background image, thinking back to my IRIX 6.2 box (a wonderful Indigo2 Extreme that now collects dust:|) and the "CPU Eater" background - a 3-D realtime-rendered SGI logo. And eat the CPU it certainly did.
Re:It's not a bug!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Nope. It was originally called the "bug" because it looks like a dead spider lying on its back with its legs curled up.
The point is that if you want to render 3-D graphics on a wall of 36 LCD displays in a 6x6 grid
Or if you want to have, say, 16 GPUs working in parallel on one 1600x1200 display channel for an ungodly amount of detail... The Onyx4 (and previously, Onyx InfinitePerformance) can do that as well.
Well, there you go. Learn something new every day.
-Alex
Re:SGI Problems
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Any idea where or who to contact about this? I just got an older Indigo 2 that I'd like to get running again and I'm having these exact problems so bad it prevents system boot.
Show me a PC from 6 years ago that could overlay video onto surfaces with special effects (warp, transform, etc.). Now rotate a cube with 6 of these video surfaces running in parallel (one per face) at any time.
I'm pretty sure that this was possible using BeOS on my PII 450 and the onboard ATI Rage around 1998. So it's 5 years instead of six but it's not all that much of an advantage.
Origin 300 or 3000 class host
by
green+pizza
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· Score: 3, Insightful
MIPS R16000 @ 700 MHz
Onyx4, for the most part, is just another Origin 3xxx class brick. In this case, it's the new Graphics Brick. Plug as many as you want into your existing Origin.
As most Onyx4s will probably be using Origin 350s as their host, then my best guess is R16K/700 CPUs.
The CPU performance doesn't matter quite as much in an SGI as it would in a Mac or PC.
Most folks that use SGIs for number cruching have picked that platform based on its trememdous amount of memory and I/O. If their task was simply CPU bound or didn't need more than a few hundred MB/sec of IO, they'd just use a PC cluster.
Most folks that use SGIs for graphics do so because they either need tight integration with video (HD or SD, see Discreet Inferno or IFX Piranha using SGI's DM3 HD video I/O subsystem).... or because they need multiple displays running of the same system. (http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2003/j une/planetarium.html) Either each pipe running one or two displays or multiple pipes running in parallel.
Folks that use SGIs for both reasons typically require gobs of number crunching combined with some sort of display system that is able to plot the trillions of data points without bringing the machine to its knees. SGI has a lot of such cloak and dagger government / defense users.
There's also the growing Altix series of machines, which use Origin-class architecture with the Itanium processor family. There are rumors of a totally new MIPS processor coming soon as well.
The main point is that the new Onyx4 graphics are delievered in brick form, they're modular, and they will probably be eventually used on multiple SGI systems. And because SGI is leaving most of the 3D work to the ATI/NVIDIA pixel war, they can save some money and focus on other engineering aspects.
Re:Origin 300 or 3000 class host
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Onyx4, for the most part, is just another Origin 3xxx class brick. In this case, it's the new Graphics Brick. Plug as many as you want into your existing Origin.
No. Not just a little wrong. Completely fucking wrong.
In the beginning there was SN0. SN0 was known as Origin 2000.
SN0 began SN-1, which began SN-MIPS and SN-IA. SN-MIPS became Origin 3000 (3200, 3400, 3800). SN-IA became Altix 3000.
Then there was Origin 300. Origin 300 was kind of a weird hybrid. It was architecturally similar to SN-MIPS, but physically very different.
SN-MIPS/SN-IA begat SN-2. SN2 was the Origin 350 and Origin 3900. Both of these support IR graphics via XIO.
SN2 is also Onyx 4. An Onyx 4 module includes up to 4 CPU's and 8 GB of memory on an SN-2 node board, and it includes up to two Voyager graphics pipes. It's physically similar to an Origin 350, but internally different.
if SGI would just lower their prices to $300 they would have a lot bigger market share. those people are idiots thinking a person wants to pay 10 grand for a bottom of the line computer.
(that was for all the people who think Apple workstations are over priced)
--
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Re:SGI Problems
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Ever more stupid than your parent's post was the guy who modded him up.
I run an Indigo 2 with a MIPS R4400 200mhz 1mb cache....which is a fairly low end model. By doing some rough cpu benchmarks (rendering scenes in POV-Ray), it seemed to place a little shy of my old PC, which is a 233mhz Pentium II.
Note that for the video capture above on an Indigo 2, you'd need the galileo video option, or some similar device, but that's nit-picking.
The MIPS R10k and R12k systems are far superior, though even with the Max Impact graphics set, you will be disappointed with textured 3d if you're used to current hardware (max is similar to a TnT2, I'd say).
Still, my indigo was out (with the "extreme" graphics set - 8 GL processors, 2 raster engines, 1 geometry pre-processor, no texture) when the best PC you could buy was a decked-out 486, or possibly a pentium 60.
I still want a Crimson Reality Engine, just for the coolness factor. Best looking case ever!:)
They're actually ashamed of their CPU, and don't want to tell you what it is or how fast in runs. (Most likely.)
Not likely at all imho. SGI's use MIPS as someone pointed out. The latest ones are 700MHz I believe. Another cool feature with the MIPS processors are that they don't consume much power. I seem to remember that they about 17w or so, allowing you to put a lot of cpus together without the need for a lot of cooling.
And when it comes to specs, I'm sure that someone can point out that the processor speed is not nearly as important as the architecture of the machine. I think it was spec.org who did some test a few years ago comparing the 400mhz MIPS and a 1GHz AMD/Intel and found that the MIPS had about 70% of the computing power to the AMD/Intel, but when You put this in a multiprocessor machine (4 I think) the MIPS was 120% to the AMD/Intel and when scaled up even further(16-32), AMD/Intel wasn't even on the charts.
No, SGI has NOTHING to be ashamed of when it comes to their MIPS.
.haeger
-- You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion.
-- Harlan Ellison
I think it was spec.org who did some test a few years ago comparing the 400mhz MIPS and a 1GHz AMD/Intel and found that the MIPS had about 70% of the computing power to the AMD/Intel, but when You put this in a multiprocessor machine (4 I think) the MIPS was 120% to the AMD/Intel and when scaled up even further(16-32), AMD/Intel wasn't even on the charts.
This was probably due to a superior memory fabric in the SGI machine, since AMD/Intel SMP boxes were (back then) simple shared-bus devices. The AMD/Intel boxes were "not even on the charts" because there were no 16-32 way x86 boxes back then.
No, SGI has NOTHING to be ashamed of when it comes to their MIPS.
SGI has a GREAT DEAL to be ashamed of when it comes to MIPS. The R16k was designed for the embedded market and is not competitive in performance with other CPUs. It loses even to mass-market CPUs like Intel & AMD. It loses embarrassingly to its RISC competition, regularly posting SpecFP scores that are 1/4th or less that of POWER4 or Itanium2.
The R16K was NEVER intended for the embeded market. BUt of course you have no idea what you are talking about, the MIPS R14/16/18K come from the SGI MIPS side of things not the spun off MIPS Computer side of things those are the guys doing all the embeded stuff. But of course lack of knowledge never stopped you from posting arbitrary spec numbers pulled out of hte thing air...
SGI has a GREAT DEAL to be ashamed of when it comes to MIPS. The R16k was designed for the embedded market and is not competitive in performance with other CPUs. It loses even to mass-market CPUs like Intel & AMD. It loses embarrassingly to its RISC competition, regularly posting SpecFP scores that are 1/4th or less that of POWER4 or Itanium2
What a load of old twaddle. Most current embedded MIPs processors are based upon the R42XX architecture. They are fast enough for what you need them for (300 mips) and they don't cooked you hardware when not fitted with a fan.
What a load of old twaddle. Most current embedded MIPs processors are based upon the R42XX architecture. They are fast enough for what you need them for (300 mips) and they don't cooked you hardware when not fitted with a fan.
The R16K is based on the R10K core, NOT the R4k core as you claim.
The R16K was NEVER intended for the embeded market. BUt of course you have no idea what you are talking about, the MIPS R14/16/18K come from the SGI MIPS side of things not the spun off MIPS Computer side of things those are the guys doing all the embeded stuff.
Fool, the R16k was based on the R10k core which was designed by MIPS not SGI; SGI doesn't even have a CPU development team any more and doesn't even own the trademark for r16k. The R16k was a "tweak" of the R10k core by _MIPS_.
But of course lack of knowledge never stopped you from posting arbitrary spec numbers pulled out of hte thing air...
Dude, you can check out the numbers on spec.org if you can figure out how to use a browser:
Fool, the R16k was based on the R10k core which was designed by MIPS not SGI; SGI doesn't even have a CPU development team any more and doesn't even own the trademark for r16k. The R16k was a "tweak" of the R10k core by _MIPS_.
100% False. SGI bought and merged with MIPS in 1992. They then designed T5 (R10K) in 1994-5. They spun-off the embeded section of MIPS in 1998. SGI still retains their own MIPS development team and are actively working on several processors. Remember MIPS is an open platform, anyone can get a license and make chips. And what of SGI not owning the trademark? They license the name from MIPS Technologies, so...???
N0 (R16K) was a big redesign, the begining of a new line, and N1 and N2 will be all new designs.
You've also skewed those SPECfp numbers. R14K is supported in many systems and you chose to quote the slowest system.
SGI Origin 3200 1X 600MHz R14k 499
Also the R14000A is an older CPU and the Itanium2 is just newly released. More fair would be to quote numbers for the new MIPS CPUs, unfortuneately they're unavailable. But then it would also pay to step back and realize that the current SPEC CPU benchmarks have several flaws, being most noteably used by SUN, which render them unreliable.
So you can quote SPEC left and right, the plain facts come back to applications performance. And for most of my apps the SGI systems are the fastest and most scaleable prepackaged computers you can buy.
N0 (R16K) was a big redesign, the begining of a new line, and N1 and N2 will be all new designs.
This is false. The r16k was not a fundamentally new design; it's based entirely on the r10k and is a 4-issue 5-unit design, just like the r10k. Here is a quote from the "SGIstuff" website, which is heavily biased in favor of MIPS: "Like the R12000 and R14000 the R16000 CPU is an enhanced version of the R10000 architecture." What you said about the N1 and N2 was also false; they're nothing more than minor tweaks of the current inadequate r10k core. The N1 is an r16k with a process shrink, an additional load/store unit, and the cache moved on-die. The N2 will likely be the same sort of thing (another process improvement?) but perhaps with 2 cores on die.
SGI bought and merged with MIPS in 1992. They then designed T5 (R10K) in 1994-5. They spun-off the embeded section of MIPS in 1998. SGI still retains their own MIPS development team and are actively working on several processors. Remember MIPS is an open platform, anyone can get a license and make chips.
This is true very misleading. SGI bought but did not merge with MIPS. The development of a modern CPU from scratch could cost hundreds of millions of dollars which is more than SGI is worth. Sun employs 4,000 on Sparc development which is as many as work at SGI altogether. It's extremely unlikely that SGI will ever again release a genuinely new core.
You've also skewed those SPECfp numbers.
I haven't skewed anything. I cut-and-pasted from the spec.org website.
R14K is supported in many systems and you chose to quote the slowest system.
Dude did you even go read the data before posting that? I absolutely did not quote the slowest system; I was being generous and quoted the very fastest MIPS system that SGI offers according to their posted SpecCPU scores. Not only was your pronouncement false, it was the diametric opposite of the truth.
Also the R14000A is an older CPU and the Itanium2 is just newly released. More fair would be to quote numbers for the new MIPS CPUs, unfortuneately they're unavailable.
The benchmark I quoted for the MIPS line had been conducted only ten months ago. Not to mention the r16k core is nearly identical to the r14k in many respects. Both Sun and SGI no longer post various benchmark scores because it's too embarrassing for them. Sun even admitted publically that such was the reason for no longer posting benchmark scores.
But then it would also pay to step back and realize that the current SPEC CPU benchmarks have several flaws, being most noteably used by SUN, which render them unreliable.
Sun has a compiler optimization that helps dramatically with one of the subtests of the SpecFP benchmark. Compiler optimizations are entirely legal since SpecCPU claims to benchmark the CPU/memory/compiler combination.
So you can quote SPEC left and right, the plain facts come back to applications performance. And for most of my apps the SGI systems are the fastest and most scaleable prepackaged computers you can buy.
In graphics apps SGI systems may have adequate performance but this hardly exonerates the MIPS processors, since most of graphics work is handled by the graphics subsystem. I had SGI workstations for years and even 4 years ago they were vastly outrun on everyday apps by commodity equipment at a fraction of the cost.
Apparently, this machine has multiple AGP busses. This is clearly an advantage as even though commodity hardware is being used, no one else provides a multiple-AGP bus system (that I know of).
Knowing how SGI is good at IO, I'm ready to bet that each bus is independent and not shared, making this harder for any competitor.
-- --
Leeeter than leet
Re:LANL's purchase...Giant AI ants!
by
ratfynk
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· Score: 1
holy cow LANL will now be able to create giant web based mutated ants!
-- OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
No offence... but you can probably pick up another I2 pretty darn cheaply. It's getting so it costs more to SHIP the Indy or I2 system than you end up paying for it!
Re:SGI Problems
by
Penguinshit
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Slashdot fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Slashdot screen for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 line troll from one message thread on the hard drive to another thread. 20 minutes. At home, on my Kur05hin account, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Slashdot, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this troll transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even fuckedcompany.net is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Slashdots, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Slashdot that has run faster than its Kuro5hin counterpart, despite the Slashdot's faster troll architecture. my.yahoo.com with 8 categories of Rueters Top News runs faster than this site at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Slashdot is a superior forum.
Slashdot addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Slashdot over other faster, cheaper, more stable forums.
Actually, from observations, I've noticed that the Intel 80186 is IBM's embedded I/O processor of choice for most of the microchannel cards for RS/6000 systems that I've seen.
I wouldn't bet on it
by
sjbe
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· Score: 2, Informative
Wouldnt the new Apple G5's with dual 2 ghz cpus crush it?
I used to use an SGI Octane SSE on a daily basis for some engineering simulation work. Heavy number crunching and 3D graphics using QUEST and some other software. My Octane had a 250Mhz MIPS processor and 768meg of RAM. Doesn't sound like much but for graphics horsepower it was essentially the equal of the dual processor 1Ghz pentium that sat across the aisle running the same applications. For pure number crunching (no graphics) the pentium was significantly faster but if there was a lot of graphics or disk I/O involved, the Octane did just fine.
Not to mention that I had the Octane crash precisely once in nearly 4 years. (had a board burn out, Octanes don't have the best cooling system and are slightly prone to overheating) Compare that with the almost weekly crashes of the Windows machine. When your job depends on 1-2 day analysis runs, you want a machine that is very reliable.
Anyway, to get to my point, no I wouldn't necessarily expect the G5 to run laps around the SGI machine. It might be faster, but probably not by a lot when you push them to the limit. Unfortunately for SGI, relatively few people actually need the features that set their machines apart. SGI makes great stuff (albeit very pricey) but it's for a very niche market.
Re:I need one of those about like I need a semi tr
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
> OTOH, maybe SGI is onto something, since they market those things to graphic artists & designers...
Actually it is targeted at Procter & Gamble and the like, for use in tampon commercials.
Seriously now, oil & gas, medical are more interesting target markets.
Re:ATI !!! - another reason
by
_ph1ux_
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· Score: 1
no kidding. When I worked at intel - I asked and asked internally if/when/please could we put out a system with mutiple AGP busses...
Fell on deaf ears though - and this was back in 99 and 00...
Imagine what gaming systems would be like now if we started with mutiple AGP busses in 99 or 2000..
I thought he was referring to the fact that the Chrome Cube reduces to an amorphous shape unless you're looking at it from 2 inches away. Thanks for the correction!
"I'm pretty sure that this was possible using BeOS on my PII 450 and the onboard ATI Rage around 1998."
Now that's seriously impressive. I mean an incoming 720x576x25fps signal in YUV 422 is ~20Mbytes/sec (roughly similar in NTSC). So, you have video->memory of 20Mbytes, Memory->CPU of 20Mbytes, CPU transform work (for when dragging the mouse distorts the cube, or suddenly the surroundings are mirrored/fogged/whatever) on 20Mbytes/sec (!) back to memory at RGBA*1280*1024*75fps (384 Mbytes/sec), and then finally a transfer (possibly over AGP) of 1280x1024x3@75fps (280 Mbytes/sec).
That gives a grand total of PCI traffic of 444Mbytes/sec and then an AGP transfer of 280 MBytes/sec.
I find that highly unlikely on a PC (on the basis that it's impossible to transfer the data, let alone process it at that rate on the PC).
Unless of course, it was running at some pathetic low resolution (640x480 ? 320x240 ?), without the alpha, Z, and stencil buffers for shadows and mirroring effects, and at a low frame rate ?
Trivial on an O2, of course - just set the video-source and sink, let the graphics h/w know about the GL environment, and let it rip. About 1000 lines of source code, and bandwidth ain't a problem.
Horses for courses...
Simon.
-- Physicists get Hadrons!
Look here if you're wondering who buys SGI stuff
by
Bob+Bitchen
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· Score: 1
Say it ain't so! I've been told now for three years that it was Linux doing all of the special effects for LOTR, and now you tell me that IRIX was part of it!
WETA transitioned from SGI to Linux between shows. So yes, some parts were done on SGIs, others under Linux.
They tried to order 80 Mustangs..
by
MilesParker
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· Score: 1
They've already dropped their prices as far as they can. This is not a commodity product. It's got a lot of proprietary or specialized technology. A lot less than it use to (unlike a Sun workstation, you can plug in an ordinary PC keyboard) but still a lot.
Nor could you sell this kind of specialized system through Best Buy. Sales channels like that barely have the expertise to deal with ordinary PCs, never mind fancy workstations with proprietary OSs.
SGI did try to do a system for the masses: the Indy. But not enough people decided it was a practical alternative to a PC or Mac. Cost them a bundle.
It would be great. I see someone having a stream going to a TV while another is playing a game...
-- --
Leeeter than leet
Re:ATI !!! - another reason
by
BWJones
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· Score: 3, Informative
It could be as cool as when I had my Macintosh Quadra 840av, only more so. I had three NUBUS graphics cards on that that could along with FA-18 Hornet 1.0 display both front views and side views at the same time making for a seriously impressive simulator experience almost a decade ago back in 1993. Think about it. This possibility is made somewhat possible with dual outputs of many current video cards, but think of the immersive environments that could be created.
Apple should take over SGI
by
afantee
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· Score: 3, Interesting
>> Wouldnt the new Apple G5's with dual 2 ghz cpus crush it?
It most certainly will, in probably every single aspect. The dual 2 GHz G5 Power Mac has 2 independent 1 GHz FSBs, dual channel 128-bit 400 MHz DDR RAM, dual 800 MHz HyperTransport interconnects, dual SATA drives with 1.5 Gbps throughput per channels.
Not only the G5 is 3x faster than the MIPS R16000 in clock speed, it also has 2 FPUs and can handle 215 simultaneous in-flight instructions, so most likely will beat the MIPS per cycle as well, not to mention the Altivec vector unit.
Of course, there are much more native Mac software, and the G5 is probably much cheaper. The only place where SGI beats Apple is at the high end super computing market, but even there it's probably better to use G5 clusters.
Currently SGI is only valued for $260, about 6% of Apple's $4.5 B cash pile, so maybe Apple should acquire SGI in order to move into the scientific computing and visualization market.
Re:Apple should take over SGI
by
afantee
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· Score: 1
>> Currently SGI is only valued for $260
I mean $260 mln.
Re:Apple should take over SGI
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The dual 2 GHz G5 Power Mac has 2 independent 1 GHz FSBs, dual channel 128-bit 400 MHz DDR RAM, dual 800 MHz HyperTransport interconnects, dual SATA drives with 1.5 Gbps throughput per channels.
None of that means shit.
Not only the G5 is 3x faster than the MIPS R16000 in clock speed, it also has 2 FPUs and can handle 215 simultaneous in-flight instructions, so most likely will beat the MIPS per cycle as well, not to mention the Altivec vector unit.
None of that means shit, either.
Wanna know why? Two reasons. First: CPU-to-memory bandwidth in the Chimera (b.k.a. Tezro) is 12.8 GB/s. And that's up to 16 GB. Sixteen real GB, not the eight sort-of GB in the G5.
Second: 4 MB of L2 cache.
In other words, whole frames of video can fit in the Tezro's secondary cache. Can't do that with a G5. Gotta go back to main memory multiple times in each frame. There goes that Altivec advantage.
The G5 would kick serious ass if they put decent bandwidth and cache on it. This 6 GB/s thing is for the birds.
Re:Apple should take over SGI
by
afantee
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· Score: 1
>> Wanna know why? Two reasons. First: CPU-to-memory bandwidth in the Chimera (b.k.a. Tezro) is 12.8 GB/s.
Do your math, man. The dual 1 GHz FSBs in the G5 gives a 16 GB/s CPU-to-memory bandwidth which is 30% greater than the Tezro, and with the dual channel DDR RAM having a bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s, who need cache?
Re:Apple should take over SGI
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
with the dual channel DDR RAM having a bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s, who need cache?
Go to your local library. Find any book on computer design. Learn the difference between BANDWIDTH and LATENCY.
Then, and only then, should you come back and post again.
Moron.
Re:I need one of those about like I need a semi tr
by
Billly+Gates
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· Score: 1
If I could have any sgi case I would want a case from their cray super-computer series wouldn't you?:-)
Mount a pc style motherboard racket inside and install a standard pc. Create a circuit board to flash all the led's to make it look real and impress your friends.
Thanks for the informative reply. I'm not a multimedia person and didn't think that you meant 6 full 720x576x25fps video streams. I think the screen res. was probably 1024x768 and the cube was not full screen so the cube was most likely 640x480 or smaller. I was serious about the rotating video cube on a 1998 pc though. Here, is a mirror of the BeOS tour. Below the second screenshot they mention the video cube. From there discription, as well as your figures, it probably didn't support video on all 6 faces at once.
Now how about Irix 7.0?
by
phoroszowski
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· Score: 1
I've had the good fortune of working on SGI machines for years, but what I want now is a modern operating system not one that's been unchanged for basically 6 years...
What is a shame is constraints
by
ratfynk
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· Score: 1
Too bad the business consumer is still reliant on antiquated PC architechture. The average consumer, wants to by a P4 for under 1000 bucks. So companies put a P4 into board and OS that is something similar to having Lily Tomlin answering the interupts! Hyperthreading is a good name especially if you look at the first word in the two word jargon (hype). Wow, I got 3ghrz but my system sucks.
I have seen good old quad P200 pros on Proliants that smoke by comparison. It will be interesting if the AMD guys get together with Asus and the likes to make a real multi processor smoker for the business market that can retail for under 2000. Problem is they are constrained by the need to build for i386 and WindowsXP! Until the Windows/Intel monopoly is broken the only real advancements in tech are going to come from the high end makers like CGI.
}
} *sigh*
-- OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Actually R3K's were sold at higher speed rates (40MHz was the top offered by SGI) since it is still produced for embeded cores.
So sad
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I remember those days.
I had a customer ask me in one of the sales offices if he could use his corporate credit card to purchase several of our Indigo2's. I had just given him a demo of the "new" R10k at 195 MHz Maxium Impact running his ISVs code.
The guy had something like 80k$ of credit on the card. No sales rep could take his order.
I sent a note off to Ed, TJ, and DiNucci and asked them why couldn't we take credit cards? No response.
Shit... I just signed up my business to use it at my bank a few months ago. It is positively painless.
When I was there selling was made painful by the constant sales org re-org. We did not really have to change what we did while we had musical managers. These folks wanted to put their stamp (or mark if you think of a cat pissing on their territory) so they shuffled. This only pissed my customers off.
The marketeers fell in love with their ideas, too bad they never got feedback from the customers on what was needed or desired. I still remember some amazing meetings where the customer told the marketeers what to not talk about. The marketeers then promptly ignored the customers and talked about it anyway.
The products were cool and kick ass in 95. They were cool in 97 and 98. Today, well....
Defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. I still have many friends there, and I like and respect them tremendously. SGI simply never had management with a clue, or with sufficient power to do what was needed. The will never existed at the corporate level to win. They let the folks at Sun, with vastly inferiour hardware beat them and define the market to the customer. Every battle was uphill, against entrenched enemies...
I still think Bo should have been prosecuted for abdication of his fiduciary trust for SGI shareholders when he sold the Cray SPARC machine to Sun. No brainer for McNealy, 100M$ for 1 B$ in revenue in the first year, with no R&D, or other costs. I would have done that deal if I were Scott. Would have laughed all the way to the bank. Cha CHING....
I still remember the 96 sales meeting when TJ said "hey, we are number one in web servers, go figure". They dropped that thought and moved on. Turns out the Challenge S and Indy was just unbeatable at serving. That is, until the next year. Then the Sun and IBM machines started to take off in performance.
SGI is a tale of wasted efforts, blown opportunities, and some of the most amazing talent and wonderful people coupled with some the most ineffective and clueless management.
I loved working there. There was no place better. I will be quite suprised if they are around as a going concern in one years time. Read their 8k http://biz.yahoo.com/e/030512/sgi10-q.html especially about their Senior Convertable Notes. If they cannot get these financial instruments in order....
I wish them well, they have an amazing opportunity with the whole homeland defense bit. From what I saw on Yahoo about them not being selected for HPCS phase II, it looks like the gubment is even betting against them.
And you will be able to buy it at Weird Stuff http://www.weirdstuff.com/
-- Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
Will Rogers
I'll have the braised troll with the '87 red
by
miu
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· Score: 1
You have very low troll expectations.
Least this Fam guy is better than that awful
'mensa babe', whose tedious schtick includs
gems like "pretending to be a woman",
"pretending to be in mensa", "making intentional
spelling errors in.sig", and many (not really)
more.
--
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
Re:I'll have the braised troll with the '87 red
by
KewlPC
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· Score: 1
You forgot that "mensa babe" includes waaay too many comments in "her" sentences, often at gramatically incorrect places, and almost always at places that break the flow of the sentence.
A typical mensa babe comment might look something like this:
These new SGI workstations, are, so cool. I just can't begin, to tell you how excited, I am.
I want a Crimson RE, too. If you find one, maybe I can rent out the loft?;-D
Re:ATI !!! - another reason
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Apparently, this machine has multiple AGP busses.
Nope. The processor-to-graphics interconnect is a custom bus originally developed for the Fuel. It's electrically similar to PCI-X, but it runs the XIO+ protocol.
Re:Say it ain't so!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Where do these rumors come from? WETA didn't transition from anything to anything. They still use SGI workstations, and Linux render nodes. Same as always.
Sheesh. Get it through your heads, people. SGI is for the desktop. (And the federally funded national laboratory with the armed guards out front.) Linux is for use in unattended farms.
Re:I need one of those about like I need a semi tr
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Brilliant idea.
Oh, wait, no. You forgot one thing. The smallest Cray ever made, the single-cabinet J90, takes up three square meters of floor space and stands seven feet tall.
That's Cray's version of a laptop.
Maybe you'd better go back to playing with your toy computers before you hurt yourself.
Yup, 1996 is when I was running intranet pages (chemistry/computational chemistry/molecular modelling) off the Indy I had on my desk.
Ran very nicely, even coped with that while I was doing my mol. modelling work at the same time...
-- "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
64bit A very GOOD THING [TM]
by
Penguinoflight
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· Score: 1
Remember, these processors are 64bit, and they are not as fast as a opteron, but then, the opteron isn't proven, and I don't know any of the specs on them for performance compared to other processors.
SGI systems stay around because they are literally a must-have for some businesses, even despite their high costs. OTOH, Apple... nevermind.:-)
--
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
SGI is kind of a parody version of Apple. Their hardware is more overpriced and harder to upgrade, it's great for graphics and scientific computation (and not much else), they use really slow CPUs (MHz myth or no), their hardware looks bizarre (albeit in a much cheesier way, e.g. they used to sell Sony Trinitrons sprayed with flecked paint) and they're even more arrogant.
Unlike Apple, they have a terrible GUI. (Like Apple, they fiercely defend it.)
Also unlike Apple, they were dumb (and arrogant) enough to try to get into the x86 market (an object lesson for those who argue Apple should do it). Would you like our top-of-the-line box with a 6 months out of date CPU at 2x Intergraph's price for a better machine or our entry-level box with a 12 months out of date CPU at 1.5x Intergraph's price for a better machine?
For me, the funniest part of dealing with SGI was watching their sales reps struggle with their own home-grown presentation software. (Keynote it wasn't.)
Cheesier? I can't say that I like their latest round of gear but for a long time SGI had the coolest looking workstations in the world. Nothing Apple has produced even comes close to the design of the O2.
The granite colored monitors, keyboards, and mice weren't spray painted. The plastic was molded that way, and it's very subtle and attractive. The Indy looks blue from a distance but up close it looks like a slab of blue granite.
4Dwm is one of the best environments to *work* in. And if there is something you don't like it is easy to change. Take a look at some of the screenshots over at Nekochan.net: http://www.nekochan.net/gallery/
Speaking as someone who used to sit in front of a computer all day and model in Pro/E, money aside there is no better place to be than in front of an SGI.
Not to say that SGI is blameless or perfect. For a long time they were ridding high, their stuff was great, and by all accounts they were the coolest company to work for. But they fell from grace and have been horribly missmanaged by several CEOs and made several dumb moves. Right now their CPUs are lagging (though not as much as you'd think) because under the last CEO they severely slowed development in anticipation of moving to Itanium. They messed around with x86, and they didn't concentrate on lowering prices, all bad moves. Now they're back on track, concentrating on what they're good at, MIPS development is raging again and lots of good things are in the works. Their golden era is over, and it's foolish to hope for a return to those times, but I'd still like to see them back on top again and selling products I can justify buying.
... and finally WETA who did Lord of the Rings effects. The first film was rendered on Linux, and for the second film they were using Linux on desktops too...
[Talking about Gollum] The most incredible special effects in recent movie history were not created on high-end Silicon Graphics workstations running Unix. They were built on farms of industry-standard servers and workstations with Intel processors and running Red Hat Linux... To Weta Digital's delight, performance with Linux has been exceptional. As a former user of Silicon Graphics systems and the Irix operating system (based on Unix), the company now runs its high-end applications on Linux, including Alias|Wavefront's Maya, Apple's Shake, and Pixar's RenderMan and Alfred
Wellington-based digital effects facility Weta Digital, Ltd. will move a significant proportion of production work related to The Lord of the Rings film trilogy onto IBM Intellistations running Linux... The first of the new machines were installed at Weta Digital in early May for use by the special effects artists working on The Two Towers, the second film in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
(I couldn't provide a link to IBM as their site was broken when I tried to access the article.)
So where do the rumors come from? WETA and IBM, apparently. (Not to mention various little Linux sites that jump all over press releases like this)
Re:Say it ain't so!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
So that answers the question about where the rumors come from: press releases taken wildly out of context. The point remains that Weta (it's not an acronym, you moron) uses Linux render nodes and SGI on the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you love something you must set it free. We love these workstations, so we're releasing them today. If it's meant to be, they'll be returned to us... after their hefty leases are up."
The huge news with the new systems does not seem to be mentioned on SGIs site. They use ATI chips/cards for the graphics .... SGI has given up on doing proprietary graphics solutions it would seem .. and with good reason imnsho!
news.com story
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
/me does a Dire Straits riff on his air guitar...
It's great to see SGI hanging in there, even though the industries in which they used to dominate have largely become the territory of cheap Linux PCs. While SGIs can no longer boast superior hardware of software, their brand still holds enough cachet for them to stick around a few more years a la Apple.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
Now watch, some "expert troll" is about to come out of the woodworks and point out a bunch of cheap SGI systems or "I use SGI because of....and therefore it is not 99%.....blah blah".
You know want too, froggy, jump.
You can plug up to 32 ATI R300 class cores into one of these puppies. Might even run Doom III fast.
Yet more machines for geeks to dribble over.. I know I wouldn't mind one of those on my desk, even if all I used it for was browsing the net and checking my email..
:)
Though its worth bearing in mind that you can still pick up some half decent SGI workstations on eBay.. seen some SGI Octane / 20" Monitor / 768MB RAM bundles on UK eBay for around £350 which is a superb deal.. these things might be getting on a bit, but they certainly do shift.
I used to own both an old Indy and an Indigo2, both of which would be the equivilant of an 8086 in PeeCee computing terms.. but they still cruised along even on the latest version of Irix, and were surprisingly usable
Really must get another SGI some day..
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
LANL bought an 80 processor Onyx 4. Check HPC Wire for the story.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Reason for this change is that a InfiniteReality4 can calculate 3 millionen polygons/s, a ATI chip can do about 10 millionen polygons/s in immediate mode or 75 millionen polygons/s in display list mode.
More information in this article, translation here.
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
Up to 4 700 MHZ MIPS R4000 processors in the rackmount, or up to 2 in the tower. 12-bit alpha channel, 24-bit Z buffer. 128MB graphics memory. p to 8 GB main RAM in the tower, up to 16GB in the rackmount. Nice. SGI's were once the pinnacle of graphics performance, but one has to wonder with the predeominance of cheaper Wintel or Lintel boxes that have practically comparable performance, how relevant are these boxes still?
My journal has hot
The presence of the old "bug" logo warms the cockles of my heart, even if the desktop Tezro looks much like a subwoofer
What is a computer supposed to look like, and why?
I thought the Tezro was kind of nifty looking, other than its Nintendo Purple color scheme.
Tezro comes in both desktop and rackmount form factors. 1 - 4 MIPS R16000 processors, up to 16 GB RAM, 7 PCI-X slots from 3 busses. Based on Origin 350 architecture.
u ly/lanl.html
Onyx4 "supports" up to 32 graphics GPUs, but more can be added. Each pipe can drive one or two displays or up to 16 GPUs can be used together in parallel for increased performance. Onyx4 is essentially a new graphics brick to be used on Origin 300 or 3000 class host systems.
SGI has issued a press release discussing a monster Onyx4 they've already sold:
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2003/j
There are gobs of new SD and HD video card available for both new systems, as well as new audio card offerings. Both machines will seem to require at least IRIX 6.5.21 (the August 2003 quarterly release) to run.
So are are SGI MIPS-based workstations are dinosaurs.
By using ATI GPUs, SGI can focus on their architecture, I/O, and SD/HD video options, rather than try to fight the ATI/NVIDIA 3D battle.
The new Onyx4 systems are able to drive multiple GPUs independently or in parallel for even more performance. All of this is backed by gobs of CPUs an many GB of RAM to feed the gfx.
A particularly interestingone about their role in the making of the LOTR:
The Wellington, New Zealand, company is using a full complement of IRIX OS-based Silicon Graphics® Octane® and Silicon Graphics® Onyx2® visual workstations, SGI® Origin® family servers, and SGI Linux OS-based visual workstations and servers to create and manage up to 100TB of data. Cool pictures too.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
You mean they would be non-existent (since the PC never used a 8086 chip)?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I vote Novell.
It makes me wonder, though, why an obvious workhorse machine is packaged up in a box that would make Alienware blush. Sorta like if White Freightliner started slapping Lamborghini-made bodies on their trucks.
OTOH, maybe SGI is onto something, since they market those things to graphic artists & designers...
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Up to 4 700 MHZ MIPS R4000 processors in the rackmount, or up to 2 in the tower. 12-bit alpha channel, 24-bit Z buffer. 128MB graphics memory. p to 8 GB main RAM in the tower, up to 16GB in the rackmount. Nice. SGI's were once the pinnacle of graphics performance, but one has to wonder with the predeominance of cheaper Wintel or Lintel boxes that have practically comparable performance, how relevant are these boxes still?
If you have gobs of IRIX code you need to run today, or if you need gobs of I/O on a desktop machine today, there isn't much other choice.
You're quoting specs from the Tezro workstation, which BTW, uses R16000 processors, not R4000. The Tezro uses Origin 350 architecture and has 3 PCI-X buses and two XIO buses (for gfx and HD/SD video I/O) as well as two builtin channels of SCSI. The thing is a full fledged data pump that I certainly don't need, but some folks do.
The new Onyx4 also uses Origin 350 and Origin 3000 host architecture, but can use all of that to feed 32+ ATI gfx cores per system. Can have each core drive one or two displays or can have multiple cores working in parallel. Two major uses -- doing crazy high end 3D or for visualizing big supercomputing data.
Just for shits-n-grins, I'd like to see some sgi vs. apple rendering/modeling benchmarks.
Seems to me that sgi's only real computational advantages show up in the data modeling arenae; weather, molecules, etc...
They've both got their plusses and minuses, the most impressive of which differ greatly between machines. Where's the overlap?! That's what I wanna know. How close is Apple *really* to taking on sgi's last vestiges of profitability?
Michael P Olson or friendly VP of Finance at SCO, sold off 8000 shares at 2003-07-11
[jole]
I remember at university when SGI came around with their trailer full of cool boxes. This was around 1990 - 1991. The one thing I remember about that event was the real-time demonstration of the water tentacle effect from The Abyss.
No other machine could even come close to rendering this kind of thing real-time. These days, we're spoiled by high-end graphics cards costing only hundreds of dollars which eclipse what SGI could do back then by a factor of 10.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
my guess is youre using NFS to an SGI NFS server which is really buggy.
NFS hangs really easily on SGIs for some insane reasons which SGI hasnt fixed yet.
Now that stereo 3D is available with Linux and consumer hardware, the SGI offerings look a whole lot less impressive.
I looked into getting an SGI workstation a while back but since I wasn't a big corporation they treated me like I didn't exist. If SGI dropped their prices and marketed their stuff through something like Best Buy they'd have a chance of being more than a niche market supercomputer manufacturer but maybe that's all they care about anyway.
It's just too hard to masturbate to these small images.
It was used in... I think the XT. The 8088 was used before the (older) 8086 because of cost, but the 8086 was used. I had an AT&T 8086 based DOS machine.
thank you, dear troll, for revealing your ineptitude so blatently. there is so such thing as a 3000 mhz MIPS chip, you (one is led to assume) are using a MIPS R3000, the second chip produced by MIPS, running at (at most) 33mhz. The R3000 is vintage 1990 at best.
as to your sugggestion of 64gigs of ram, i will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant 64 megs.
now, my little troll, go back to your cave.
Phus. Sysiphus.
Hmm, let's see a 8086 do realtime capturing and displaying of an ntsc video source on a 24bit 1280x1024 display. Now to be honest, 486 to low end Pentium would be a better comparison. Of course assuming these machines had some type of video capture board installed and a pretty kick butt scsi setup. Not the best things in the world for day to day tasks, but if you're doing the right thing, then they are quite nice (Indy less so since it's not as expandable, but one can create a pretty beefy I2. Not to mention the O2.
It's great to see SGI hanging in there, even though the industries in which they used to dominate have largely become the territory of cheap Linux PCs. While SGIs can no longer boast superior hardware of software, their brand still holds enough cachet for them to stick around a few more years a la Apple.
How many other PCs and Macs can handle hudreds of CPUs and 32 ATI gfx GPUs per system?
say what?
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
you cannot "slashdot" as sgi!
all yuor packets are belong to us!
SGIs have looked cool from the begining. You think this is a change? Come out of your cave.
This one's becoming another slashodot classic. It now joins the company of legendary posts relating to natalie portman's hot grits, beowulf clusters, the profit mechanism (including ???), goatse snoop links, etc.
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
No, the 8086 was never used in a PC product by IBM. Other manufs. used it though (like you said, AT&T was one of them). The PC/XT used the 8088, the AT the 80286.
I saw the article and thought "Oh cool a new power workstation" but after looking at the specs, 700mhz cpu's and such, is it? Wouldnt the new Apple G5's with dual 2 ghz cpus crush it?
Other than driving multiple gfx displays, what is the main use for this workstation? I havnt used a SGI workstation, so share the info...
You said "warms the cockles" on the front page of Slashdot.
We have yet to have the expected response...
yes
Visualize the world of wine
As sands through the hourglass, these are the trolls of our lives. . .
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
(since the PC never used a 8086 chip)?
Is that only in your alternate universe? Although the 8088 was cheaper and used first by IBM they did use the 8086 in the PS/2 model 25 and model 30 in 1987.
The new tezro box looks like the Macintosh "command" key icon extruded into 3d. Very interesting... I would hope that someday these will make really sweet micro-fridge mod cases!
stuff |
Heh, when was the last time you checked your hard disk for errors? Did you contact SGI about these problems? If you are assuming that these are OS/hardware limitations, then you're an idiot. Even a gazillion teraflops computer will do dumb things if so instructed.
I think your thinking of the the 08186.
- Alex
Since when does "Personal Computer" mean only a computer built by IBM and not its 100% clones? I think Nom du Keyboard spoke without thinking.
That is, it was never used in a PC product by IBM unless you consider the IBM PS/2 Model 25 and Model 30 IBM computers. If that is the case, then the 8086 was used in PC products from IBM.
Oh, maybe you mean one of the PC branded computers perhaps? Like the PC/XT or PC/AT? OK. Maybe you are right. But I think that is splitting hairs.
--Be human.
Um, I'm pretty sure that he meant they would exist, because the PCs most definetly did use an 8086 chip.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The "Multigen Creator" software they come with for 3-d rendering absolutely sucks and it's ridiculously slow when you have more then 20 polygons on the screen too. This is on an 02.
The O2 was new around 1997 (6 years ago) and was pitched as a lowend 'affordable' computer. It has shared video ram for chrissakes!
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
All I see it "contact a sales rep" crap. T-e-l-e-p-h-o-n-e, what's that? Fill out a form so you can get back with me if I'm a good enough customer?
What are the prices?
Why can't I just order up a couple machines off their web pages?
I was going to order 3 or 4 machines for a graphics project ohwell... Sorry SGI, you lose 'cause I couldn't get pricing information for even order the machines. Guess I'll stick with Dell or Apple.
(I'm being sarcastic, but I think I made my point)
The ratio of people to cake is too big
You realise you're comparing to an SGI that's maybe 6 years old, yes ?
.... (you get the idea)...
Show me a PC from 6 years ago that could overlay video onto surfaces with special effects (warp, transform, etc.). Now rotate a cube with 6 of these video surfaces running in parallel (one per face) at any time.
"This hardware sucks because the program's crap" is almost never a good argument. Perhaps there's a mismatch. Perhaps the program is crap, but the hardware is cool. Perhaps
SGI's in general tend to be slow CPU's with massive internal bandwidth for throwing data around, and massively fast graphics for the day. If you're running a cpu-intensive program, then Intel is probably for you. If you want a graphics/media workstation, SGI is the way to go. Surprise, the Post/Film industry likes SGI's. Discreet Logic Flame/Inferno is still the dominant s/w, and it's head and shoulders above the rest.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various SGI...
Could it be as long as your laundry list of mental and social problems?
Infinite Reality 4 has 1 GB of texture ram and 10 GB of frame buffer memory... so it doe have its advantages for a few specific users. But for the most part, using ATI gfx GPUs (working either independently or in parallel) makes far more sense than having SGI use the last of their resources to fight the ATI/NVIDIA 3D war.
SGI's strengths are with architecture and I/O. ATI's strenghts are in pixel and polygon pumps. Looks like a perfect union to me.
Interesting? This is a blatant troll adapted from the Apple board here.
Got Crack? Come Mod With Us. Slashdot.
Personally, I'd use BSD...but I hear that's dead.
Anyone know the price tag of these boxen?
SGI has always had wild colored cases, weird form factors, etc. Check out the original indigos (big blue boat anchor-style cases), the sweet purple indigo2s, the octane with the light stripe in the front, or the funky little round O2 (hate that machine, can't balance a coffee cup on top). Weird cases are nothing new for SGIs-- not usually as pretty as the apple cases, but they always catch people's attention. And the old CRT monitors can be really, really great-- of course, they weigh 100 lbs each and take up your entire desk, but working on a 24" superwide CRT is true bliss...
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Thats a good point.
The reason why that the SGI has maintained a niche in the high performance CAD market was due to its clever memory architechture and blisteringly fast 2D graphics chipset.
It's a little more obvious than that --- it's a cut-and-paste Mac troll with all references to the Power Mac 8600/300 replaced with SGI. He missed the reference to BBEdit Lite, the cut-down free version of a great Mac text editor.
I agree 100%. This is soon becoming another classic. Even more classic is the fact that few currently realizes this:
30% voted this funny (got it)
40% voted this troll (got it - hated it)
30% voted this interesting (oolala!)
And I haven't even got to the replies...
Check out the press release... 34 gfx pipes (ATI GPUs) in that machine!
Hey... someone mod this post's parent up. The AC is right, this is nearly a verbatim post from the apple forum, and is obviously a troll.
Oh, maybe you mean one of the PC branded computers perhaps? Like the PC/XT or PC/AT? OK. Maybe you are right. But I think that is splitting hairs.
;) Esp now when 99% of people you say PS/2 to will think Sony long before they think IBM.
Yes, I was referring specifically to the PC/XT/AT line (notice big PC, not little pc). After all, who counts the PS/2's anyway
Some older SGIs develop checksum errors on the SCSI bus, which can put a damper on disk throughput (as you might imagine). SGI offers a free replacement kit.
...Erwin will be getting an upgrade?
Sorta like if White Freightliner started slapping Lamborghini-made bodies on their trucks.
What the hell's wrong with that? Add more beauty to the world. No one loses. My day is considerably brightened when I look in the rearview and see a 360 Modena smiling back. A 6'x6' Mack truck radiator grille, OTOH, is a different story. And workhorses (the animals), by the way, have a beauty of power and form all their own. Compare with the BBBB (big, boring, beige box), which has... nothing pretty about it at all. Any deviation is a positive step.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
http://www.gruntville.com/news/cpl_winter_2002/day 2.html
You also failed to mention OGG THE OPENSOURCE CAVEMAN, meept(??), or the Jon Katz hate posts.
Those were the days.
For fsck sake, yet another repost of http://www.kottke.org/98/11/
Hrm, we have a couple of SGIs at work, and I was actually kind of surprised at how slow and crapy they were. The "Multigen Creator" software they come with for 3-d rendering absolutely sucks and it's ridiculously slow when you have more then 20 polygons on the screen too. This is on an 02.
You do realize that the O2 is an old machine which SGI stopped supporting sometime last year don't you? I am taking a class on advanced topics in computer graphics programming in a lab filled with SGI machines. The O2's are the most numerous and slowest of the bunch. The other SGI machines are faster, but I usually don't get to the lab in time to log onto one of them so I can't give an objective comparrison to linux and windows perfomance on them. I have noticed that openGL animations run much faster on these machines than the O2's. I don't know how the latest SGI machines stack up to Linux and Apple solutions for 3d modeling and animation as used in movies and games, but it certainly seems a better solution for scientific visualization work.
Don't let your passion for Mac overwhelm your sense of moderative responsibilty.
This is funny as hell. Where has this guy been all this time?
And looking.
And looking.
It's not there.
SGI's own datasheet for the Onyx4 Family doesn't tell you what processor it runs! Others in the thread have said it uses MIPS chips, but the word "MIPS" never appears in the datasheet (nor "RISC," for that matter). It tells you how many processors the system uses, but not what they are or how fast they are.
This is not just odd; for a datasheet, it's nearly unprecedented. Only three explanations for this abscence occur to me:
I have no idea how fast the current generation of MIPS chips are (I think the last time I saw a benchmark, they were slower than Alphas, which tells you it was back when they were still benchmarking Alphas rather than letting them die a quiet and undeserved death), but the fact that SGI isn't even willing to mention them in their datasheet doesn't give me confidence.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Yuo = teh g4y!11!
OMFG I c4n't bele1ve I s4id that! LOLOLOL11!!11
You weren't really going to buy one but you would like them to have a webstore? Why?
SGIs are not impulse items. You don't get a bug up your ass to plunk down for a $30000 workstation (unless you are some snotty rich kid who buys it just to have it). When you contact SGI you can often get deals out of the sales rep on hardware, software, bulk orders, etc. Sun is the same way (on high end servers), and Apple and can be to an extent as well.
Its like this for a reason.
Radio Shack made a computer based on the 80186.
It flopped, much like your post.
wow! you a true old-skewl /.er.
I just vaguely remember those days. I never really read anything written by JonKatz, but remember those hate posts all over the damn place.
However, I have no idea about OGG THE OPENSOURCE CAVEMAN and meept. Must be before my time. Or they might not have been too big.
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
or this one
http://quickwired.com/kallahar/indigo2/
$20k for the base tezro (10-15k for the top of the line in orders of 10 or more)
$40k for the onyx (25k in orders of 10 more. Bulk discounts rock!)
PS Boxen is not a valid term. It's BoxeS
er, two things:
1. you forgot Soviet Russia
2. WTF is it with natalie portman's hot grits? I honestly never understood this.
Regardless, thanks for the fond memories. Here's to SGI!
C|N>K
You've just been had by the classic Power Mac Problems Troll.
I wish my lawn was emo, so it would cut itself.
Hmm well an Amiga + VideoToaster could certainly do a fair bit with ntsc, don't know about 1280x1024 though.
or this one
d ig o/
http://www.tiger-marmalade.com/%7Ejames/iris_in
But how long does the 360 stay in your rearview?
Say it ain't so! I've been told now for three years that it was Linux doing all of the special effects for LOTR, and now you tell me that IRIX was part of it!
Does this mean... that... Linux can't... do everything? Noooo!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Variations of that post have been appearing in pretty much every slightly hardware related story for days now. Just ignore it, it'll go away.
The 80186 (and its 8-bit version the 80188) was also used in a few computers like the original Gateway Handbook and the Mindset PC. Still, probably much, much rarer than 8086 based machines.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Hmm, let's see a 8086 do realtime capturing and displaying of an ntsc video source on a 24bit 1280x1024 display.
no problem... give me a scsi card and a hardware capture card... I know a 286 can do it, so get a 8 bit scsi card and I'll show you.
the computer is nothing more than a simple way of making the good powerful hardware talk to each other. Hell most high end capture cards are NOT PCI/ISA/or whatever but they are SCSI. same with the high end Video output cards. and using them takes almost no processing power.
This is how I stream 48 DIFFERENT dvd quality mpeg2 files out to NTSC video at the same time on a pentium 133 motherboard with 32 meg of ram on it running NT 3.51... simple scsi commands to high end hardware.
the computer has nothing to do with what is getting done except for making it easier to install the newest command software.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's a sad fact that SGI sales are embarrassingly bad. I used to work for SGI, while I was still there I knew ex-SGI employees who tried to buy machines for REAL projects and couldn't, it was just too difficult with the whole sales rep runaround. Very frustrating! Don't believe me? Call them up and tell them you want to buy an Onyx4 system. You WILL get the runaround, especially if you want a few technical details or need to discuss configuration options. They couldn't sell popcorn in a cinema lobby.
While the Tezro is a pretty impressive looking workstation, I'm really wondering what sort of market SGI has anymore. The workhorse for the heavy 3D graphics work is the VPro V12 and the 2D video is handled by the DMediaPro expansion card. Anymore a high bandwidth high capacity 2D or 3D video accelerator is not something that necessitates a über-expensive SGI workstation. That same equipment or an equivilent could be stuck in say a G5 PowerMac or Opteron based workstation. Both would be far less expensive in initial cost and depending on your existing infrastructure have a far lower TCO and a higher return on the investment.
SGI is again looking it seems only at their existing customers. The Tezro is pretty impressive when you sit it next to your old O2 or Octane but when compared to the latest and greatest from competitors it looks a little lacking. SGI now is in the position Apple was in several years ago. They're catering to their existing yet shrinking customer base rather than the new blood that they really need to be a serious player again.
Hell they would do okay with some of their old blood they've been losing steadily. Not everyone is apt to drop $20,000 on a workstation only to need another couple thousand in HD video accelerators to get something done. They've been switching to Windows and Mac solutions because of SGI's premium price. Five workstations that can each do the same HD work as your one SGI is a much better deal for the price.
I've been a huge fan of SGI since the first time I sat down at an O2. Their systems at the time beat the crap out of anything any PC vendor offered. Now $10k work of PC workstation equipment and software will do what $50k work of SGI equipment and software will do. It is nice to see the old logo on their new machines but I'm more interested in seeing some of the old value on the new machines.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
can be found here. Written by the former hardware guru for discreet, it pretty much spells out what these machines are up to and how they compare to their predecessors. I'm no hardware guy, but it made decent sense to me. have at it!
I used to work for SGI and also did freelance video animation ( a very long time ago ) on an SGI Indy.
As an individual, the biggest problem I encountered wasn't the cost of the SGI system (a one-time cost), it was the cost of the system software and drivers.
OS upgrades were expensive.
Print drivers were expensive.
Networking options were expensive.
The compilers were unbundled.
Most of the software Open Source geeks nowadays take for granted as being free, cheap, and readily available was expensive and exotic on the SGI.
I ultimately switched to a high-end Macintosh. Today, the Mac is an even more compelling alternative to a low-end SGI for media production.
I don't know about SGI's other niches, such as Scientific Visualization, but I would expect high-end PCs to have the edge over low-end SGIs in other areas.
-S
Hey Beavis.. hehe hehe.. he said cock!
Which is they rebranded in 1998 to make the company logo the letters sgi with the bottoms cut off, as if they were appearing over the horizon. (New motto: "The Solution is in Sight!") But I guess that's even more obscure then the original logo, because now they just use the three letters.
And the original logo is very obscure. It's not a bug! It's the Chrome Cube! The whole point being that you need an SGI workstation to render the damn thing. But nobody ever got that. So sad!
The point is that if you want to render 3-D graphics on a wall of 36 LCD displays in a 6x6 grid
Or if you want to have, say, 16 GPUs working in parallel on one 1600x1200 display channel for an ungodly amount of detail... The Onyx4 (and previously, Onyx InfinitePerformance) can do that as well.
Well, there you go. Learn something new every day.
-Alex
Any idea where or who to contact about this? I just got an older Indigo 2 that I'd like to get running again and I'm having these exact problems so bad it prevents system boot.
Show me a PC from 6 years ago that could overlay video onto surfaces with special effects (warp, transform, etc.). Now rotate a cube with 6 of these video surfaces running in parallel (one per face) at any time.
I'm pretty sure that this was possible using BeOS on my PII 450 and the onboard ATI Rage around 1998. So it's 5 years instead of six but it's not all that much of an advantage.
MIPS R16000 @ 700 MHz
j une/planetarium.html) Either each pipe running one or two displays or multiple pipes running in parallel.
Onyx4, for the most part, is just another Origin 3xxx class brick. In this case, it's the new Graphics Brick. Plug as many as you want into your existing Origin.
As most Onyx4s will probably be using Origin 350s as their host, then my best guess is R16K/700 CPUs.
The CPU performance doesn't matter quite as much in an SGI as it would in a Mac or PC.
Most folks that use SGIs for number cruching have picked that platform based on its trememdous amount of memory and I/O. If their task was simply CPU bound or didn't need more than a few hundred MB/sec of IO, they'd just use a PC cluster.
Most folks that use SGIs for graphics do so because they either need tight integration with video (HD or SD, see Discreet Inferno or IFX Piranha using SGI's DM3 HD video I/O subsystem).... or because they need multiple displays running of the same system. (http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2003/
Folks that use SGIs for both reasons typically require gobs of number crunching combined with some sort of display system that is able to plot the trillions of data points without bringing the machine to its knees. SGI has a lot of such cloak and dagger government / defense users.
There's also the growing Altix series of machines, which use Origin-class architecture with the Itanium processor family. There are rumors of a totally new MIPS processor coming soon as well.
The main point is that the new Onyx4 graphics are delievered in brick form, they're modular, and they will probably be eventually used on multiple SGI systems. And because SGI is leaving most of the 3D work to the ATI/NVIDIA pixel war, they can save some money and focus on other engineering aspects.
if SGI would just lower their prices to $300 they would have a lot bigger market share. those people are idiots thinking a person wants to pay 10 grand for a bottom of the line computer.
(that was for all the people who think Apple workstations are over priced)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Ever more stupid than your parent's post was the guy who modded him up.
I run an Indigo 2 with a MIPS R4400 200mhz 1mb cache....which is a fairly low end model. By doing some rough cpu benchmarks (rendering scenes in POV-Ray), it seemed to place a little shy of my old PC, which is a 233mhz Pentium II.
:)
Note that for the video capture above on an Indigo 2, you'd need the galileo video option, or some similar device, but that's nit-picking.
The MIPS R10k and R12k systems are far superior, though even with the Max Impact graphics set, you will be disappointed with textured 3d if you're used to current hardware (max is similar to a TnT2, I'd say).
Still, my indigo was out (with the "extreme" graphics set - 8 GL processors, 2 raster engines, 1 geometry pre-processor, no texture) when the best PC you could buy was a decked-out 486, or possibly a pentium 60.
I still want a Crimson Reality Engine, just for the coolness factor. Best looking case ever!
man tunefs | grep fish
They're actually ashamed of their CPU, and don't want to tell you what it is or how fast in runs. (Most likely.)
.haeger
Not likely at all imho. SGI's use MIPS as someone pointed out. The latest ones are 700MHz I believe. Another cool feature with the MIPS processors are that they don't consume much power. I seem to remember that they about 17w or so, allowing you to put a lot of cpus together without the need for a lot of cooling.
And when it comes to specs, I'm sure that someone can point out that the processor speed is not nearly as important as the architecture of the machine.
I think it was spec.org who did some test a few years ago comparing the 400mhz MIPS and a 1GHz AMD/Intel and found that the MIPS had about 70% of the computing power to the AMD/Intel, but when You put this in a multiprocessor machine (4 I think) the MIPS was 120% to the AMD/Intel and when scaled up even further(16-32), AMD/Intel wasn't even on the charts.
No, SGI has NOTHING to be ashamed of when it comes to their MIPS.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Apparently, this machine has multiple AGP busses. This is clearly an advantage as even though commodity hardware is being used, no one else provides a multiple-AGP bus system (that I know of).
Knowing how SGI is good at IO, I'm ready to bet that each bus is independent and not shared, making this harder for any competitor.
-- Leeeter than leet
holy cow LANL will now be able to create giant web based mutated ants!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Ah but you have to remeber that all the 3D rendering on the O2 is done in software. Want faster graphics? Upgrade to the 250Mhz R10K
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
well a computer must be beige and ugly, why do you ask?
-- Leeeter than leet
Please do yourself a favor and dump that O2 now dude....
Yeah, just like my '86 car is getting rusty and I wonder why my '04 isn't?
-- Leeeter than leet
How many buttons on the mouse?
When he cut and pasted SGI for Apple, he should've also change BBEdit with Emacs (or at least an editor that actually exists in Irix).
Hrm, I guess it was an octane, not an O2.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
No offence ... but you can probably pick up another I2 pretty darn cheaply. It's getting so it costs more to SHIP the Indy or I2 system than you end up paying for it!
is that he managed to run BBEdit on IRIX.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Slashdot fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Slashdot screen for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 line troll from one message thread on the hard drive to another thread. 20 minutes. At home, on my Kur05hin account, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Slashdot, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this troll transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even fuckedcompany.net is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Slashdots, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Slashdot that has run faster than its Kuro5hin counterpart, despite the Slashdot's faster troll architecture. my.yahoo.com with 8 categories of Rueters Top News runs faster than this site at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Slashdot is a superior forum.
Slashdot addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Slashdot over other faster, cheaper, more stable forums.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Actually, from observations, I've noticed that the Intel 80186 is IBM's embedded I/O processor of choice for most of the microchannel cards for RS/6000 systems that I've seen.
Wouldnt the new Apple G5's with dual 2 ghz cpus crush it?
I used to use an SGI Octane SSE on a daily basis for some engineering simulation work. Heavy number crunching and 3D graphics using QUEST and some other software. My Octane had a 250Mhz MIPS processor and 768meg of RAM. Doesn't sound like much but for graphics horsepower it was essentially the equal of the dual processor 1Ghz pentium that sat across the aisle running the same applications. For pure number crunching (no graphics) the pentium was significantly faster but if there was a lot of graphics or disk I/O involved, the Octane did just fine.
Not to mention that I had the Octane crash precisely once in nearly 4 years. (had a board burn out, Octanes don't have the best cooling system and are slightly prone to overheating) Compare that with the almost weekly crashes of the Windows machine. When your job depends on 1-2 day analysis runs, you want a machine that is very reliable.
Anyway, to get to my point, no I wouldn't necessarily expect the G5 to run laps around the SGI machine. It might be faster, but probably not by a lot when you push them to the limit. Unfortunately for SGI, relatively few people actually need the features that set their machines apart. SGI makes great stuff (albeit very pricey) but it's for a very niche market.
> OTOH, maybe SGI is onto something, since they market those things to graphic artists & designers... Actually it is targeted at Procter & Gamble and the like, for use in tampon commercials. Seriously now, oil & gas, medical are more interesting target markets.
no kidding. When I worked at intel - I asked and asked internally if/when/please could we put out a system with mutiple AGP busses...
Fell on deaf ears though - and this was back in 99 and 00...
Imagine what gaming systems would be like now if we started with mutiple AGP busses in 99 or 2000..
I thought he was referring to the fact that the Chrome Cube reduces to an amorphous shape unless you're looking at it from 2 inches away. Thanks for the correction!
Now that's seriously impressive. I mean an incoming 720x576x25fps signal in YUV 422 is ~20Mbytes/sec (roughly similar in NTSC). So, you have video->memory of 20Mbytes, Memory->CPU of 20Mbytes, CPU transform work (for when dragging the mouse distorts the cube, or suddenly the surroundings are mirrored/fogged/whatever) on 20Mbytes/sec (!) back to memory at RGBA*1280*1024*75fps (384 Mbytes/sec), and then finally a transfer (possibly over AGP) of 1280x1024x3@75fps (280 Mbytes/sec).
That gives a grand total of PCI traffic of 444Mbytes/sec and then an AGP transfer of 280 MBytes/sec.
I find that highly unlikely on a PC (on the basis that it's impossible to transfer the data, let alone process it at that rate on the PC).
Unless of course, it was running at some pathetic low resolution (640x480 ? 320x240 ?), without the alpha, Z, and stencil buffers for shadows and mirroring effects, and at a low frame rate ?
Trivial on an O2, of course - just set the video-source and sink, let the graphics h/w know about the GL environment, and let it rip. About 1000 lines of source code, and bandwidth ain't a problem.
Horses for courses...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
http://www.sgi.com/industries/
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
WETA transitioned from SGI to Linux between shows. So yes, some parts were done on SGIs, others under Linux.
That's the funniest thing I've read all day.
you've got a car FROM THE FUTURE?
you're not Dr Brown, are you?
That was classic intercourse!
These exact problems? Netscape grinding to a halt or slow typing in BBEdit Lite for IRIX?
Nor could you sell this kind of specialized system through Best Buy. Sales channels like that barely have the expertise to deal with ordinary PCs, never mind fancy workstations with proprietary OSs.
SGI did try to do a system for the masses: the Indy. But not enough people decided it was a practical alternative to a PC or Mac. Cost them a bundle.
Anyone know how this Tezro thing compares to the Duallie G5 Macs? The SGI has more expansion capacity for sure, but how about raw horsepower?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
It would be great. I see someone having a stream going to a TV while another is playing a game...
-- Leeeter than leet
It could be as cool as when I had my Macintosh Quadra 840av, only more so. I had three NUBUS graphics cards on that that could along with FA-18 Hornet 1.0 display both front views and side views at the same time making for a seriously impressive simulator experience almost a decade ago back in 1993. Think about it. This possibility is made somewhat possible with dual outputs of many current video cards, but think of the immersive environments that could be created.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
>> Wouldnt the new Apple G5's with dual 2 ghz cpus crush it?
It most certainly will, in probably every single aspect. The dual 2 GHz G5 Power Mac has 2 independent 1 GHz FSBs, dual channel 128-bit 400 MHz DDR RAM, dual 800 MHz HyperTransport interconnects, dual SATA drives with 1.5 Gbps throughput per channels.
Not only the G5 is 3x faster than the MIPS R16000 in clock speed, it also has 2 FPUs and can handle 215 simultaneous in-flight instructions, so most likely will beat the MIPS per cycle as well, not to mention the Altivec vector unit.
Of course, there are much more native Mac software, and the G5 is probably much cheaper. The only place where SGI beats Apple is at the high end super computing market, but even there it's probably better to use G5 clusters.
Currently SGI is only valued for $260, about 6% of Apple's $4.5 B cash pile, so maybe Apple should acquire SGI in order to move into the scientific computing and visualization market.
Mount a pc style motherboard racket inside and install a standard pc. Create a circuit board to flash all the led's to make it look real and impress your friends.
http://saveie6.com/
Thanks for the informative reply. I'm not a multimedia person and didn't think that you meant 6 full 720x576x25fps video streams. I think the screen res. was probably 1024x768 and the cube was not full screen so the cube was most likely 640x480 or smaller. I was serious about the rotating video cube on a 1998 pc though. Here, is a mirror of the BeOS tour. Below the second screenshot they mention the video cube. From there discription, as well as your figures, it probably didn't support video on all 6 faces at once.
I've had the good fortune of working on SGI machines for years, but what I want now is a modern operating system not one that's been unchanged for basically 6 years...
The average consumer, wants to by a P4 for under 1000 bucks. So companies put a P4 into board and OS that is something similar to having Lily Tomlin answering the interupts! Hyperthreading is a good name especially if you look at the first word in the two word jargon (hype). Wow, I got 3ghrz but my system sucks.
I have seen good old quad P200 pros on Proliants that smoke by comparison. It will be interesting if the AMD guys get together with Asus and the likes to make a real multi processor smoker for the business market that can retail for under 2000. Problem is they are constrained by the need to build for i386 and WindowsXP! Until the Windows/Intel monopoly is broken the only real advancements in tech are going to come from the high end makers like CGI.
}
}
*sigh*
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Actually R3K's were sold at higher speed rates (40MHz was the top offered by SGI) since it is still produced for embeded cores.
I remember those days.
....
....
I had a customer ask me in one of the sales offices if he could use his corporate credit card to purchase several of our Indigo2's. I had just given him a demo of the "new" R10k at 195 MHz Maxium Impact running his ISVs code.
The guy had something like 80k$ of credit on the card. No sales rep could take his order.
I sent a note off to Ed, TJ, and DiNucci and asked them why couldn't we take credit cards? No response.
Shit... I just signed up my business to use it at my bank a few months ago. It is positively painless.
When I was there selling was made painful by the constant sales org re-org. We did not really have to change what we did while we had musical managers. These folks wanted to put their stamp (or mark if you think of a cat pissing on their territory) so they shuffled. This only pissed my customers off.
The marketeers fell in love with their ideas, too bad they never got feedback from the customers on what was needed or desired. I still remember some amazing meetings where the customer told the marketeers what to not talk about. The marketeers then promptly ignored the customers and talked about it anyway.
The products were cool and kick ass in 95. They were cool in 97 and 98. Today, well
Defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. I still have many friends there, and I like and respect them tremendously. SGI simply never had management with a clue, or with sufficient power to do what was needed. The will never existed at the corporate level to win. They let the folks at Sun, with vastly inferiour hardware beat them and define the market to the customer. Every battle was uphill, against entrenched enemies...
I still think Bo should have been prosecuted for abdication of his fiduciary trust for SGI shareholders when he sold the Cray SPARC machine to Sun. No brainer for McNealy, 100M$ for 1 B$ in revenue in the first year, with no R&D, or other costs. I would have done that deal if I were Scott. Would have laughed all the way to the bank. Cha CHING....
I still remember the 96 sales meeting when TJ said "hey, we are number one in web servers, go figure". They dropped that thought and moved on. Turns out the Challenge S and Indy was just unbeatable at serving. That is, until the next year. Then the Sun and IBM machines started to take off in performance.
SGI is a tale of wasted efforts, blown opportunities, and some of the most amazing talent and wonderful people coupled with some the most ineffective and clueless management.
I loved working there. There was no place better. I will be quite suprised if they are around as a going concern in one years time. Read their 8k http://biz.yahoo.com/e/030512/sgi10-q.html especially about their Senior Convertable Notes. If they cannot get these financial instruments in order
I wish them well, they have an amazing opportunity with the whole homeland defense bit. From what I saw on Yahoo about them not being selected for HPCS phase II, it looks like the gubment is even betting against them.
A Cluster of Commadore C-64s networked inside
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
And you will be able to buy it at Weird Stuff
http://www.weirdstuff.com/
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Least this Fam guy is better than that awful 'mensa babe', whose tedious schtick includs gems like "pretending to be a woman", "pretending to be in mensa", "making intentional spelling errors in .sig", and many (not really)
more.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
I want a Crimson RE, too. If you find one, maybe I can rent out the loft? ;-D
Apparently, this machine has multiple AGP busses.
Nope. The processor-to-graphics interconnect is a custom bus originally developed for the Fuel. It's electrically similar to PCI-X, but it runs the XIO+ protocol.
Where do these rumors come from? WETA didn't transition from anything to anything. They still use SGI workstations, and Linux render nodes. Same as always.
Sheesh. Get it through your heads, people. SGI is for the desktop. (And the federally funded national laboratory with the armed guards out front.) Linux is for use in unattended farms.
Brilliant idea.
Oh, wait, no. You forgot one thing. The smallest Cray ever made, the single-cabinet J90, takes up three square meters of floor space and stands seven feet tall.
That's Cray's version of a laptop.
Maybe you'd better go back to playing with your toy computers before you hurt yourself.
Did you even bother to click the link? IBM did sell PCs with 8086 chips in their PS/2 line. I'm sure clonemakers did too.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yup, 1996 is when I was running intranet pages (chemistry/computational chemistry/molecular modelling) off the Indy I had on my desk.
Ran very nicely, even coped with that while I was doing my mol. modelling work at the same time...
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
Remember, these processors are 64bit, and they are not as fast as a opteron, but then, the opteron isn't proven, and I don't know any of the specs on them for performance compared to other processors.
:-)
SGI systems stay around because they are literally a must-have for some businesses, even despite their high costs. OTOH, Apple... nevermind.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
SGI is kind of a parody version of Apple. Their hardware is more overpriced and harder to upgrade, it's great for graphics and scientific computation (and not much else), they use really slow CPUs (MHz myth or no), their hardware looks bizarre (albeit in a much cheesier way, e.g. they used to sell Sony Trinitrons sprayed with flecked paint) and they're even more arrogant.
Unlike Apple, they have a terrible GUI. (Like Apple, they fiercely defend it.)
Also unlike Apple, they were dumb (and arrogant) enough to try to get into the x86 market (an object lesson for those who argue Apple should do it). Would you like our top-of-the-line box with a 6 months out of date CPU at 2x Intergraph's price for a better machine or our entry-level box with a 12 months out of date CPU at 1.5x Intergraph's price for a better machine?
For me, the funniest part of dealing with SGI was watching their sales reps struggle with their own home-grown presentation software. (Keynote it wasn't.)
They probably come from sites like this:
And this:
And this:
(I couldn't provide a link to IBM as their site was broken when I tried to access the article.)
So where do the rumors come from? WETA and IBM, apparently. (Not to mention various little Linux sites that jump all over press releases like this)
So that answers the question about where the rumors come from: press releases taken wildly out of context. The point remains that Weta (it's not an acronym, you moron) uses Linux render nodes and SGI on the desktop.