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."
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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:(
you're right. from now on slashdot should only feature stories abut the latest wal-mart pc's.
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: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.
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.
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?
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
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.
-- That was classic intercourse!
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.
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
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
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
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: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.
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.
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.
Re:Nice...8086 Huh
by
hamburger+lady
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· Score: 2, Informative
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
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
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.
-- --Be human.
Re:Multigen creator
by
Fulcrum+of+Evil
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· 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"
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.
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.
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.
Re:How relevant are these boxes?
by
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:I need one of those about like I need a semi tr
by
rhombic
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· 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.
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.
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.
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: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.
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?
by
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?
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
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:How relevant are these boxes?
by
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: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.
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)
Re:Insightful?
by
autojive
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· Score: 2, Informative
-- I wish my lawn was emo, so it would cut itself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
-S
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)
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!
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.
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: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)
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 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."
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:How relevant are these boxes?
by
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.....
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: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.
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
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
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...
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.
you're right. from now on slashdot should only feature stories abut the latest wal-mart pc's.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
say what?
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
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.
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.
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"
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!
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.
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.
A mac in NO WAY can compare to the ONYX4. You sir are on some strong dope.
Meatplow
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.
I have to agree...
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.
...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.
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...
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.
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/
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).
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.
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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)
You've just been had by the classic Power Mac Problems Troll.
I wish my lawn was emo, so it would cut itself.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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
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
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)
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 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.
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.
Yes, but each TASK can still only use 4GB of ram. (OR use a hack similary to the Intel Xeon but that is ugly)
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
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."
Typing it into the little white box a million times won't make it true, you ignorant asshat.
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.....
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.
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.