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Reliving The Glory Days of SGI
devin15 writes "Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days? Wired is running an article about a group for whom the glory days of SGI have not yet gone. From the article:" If the Mac community is dwarfed by the Microsoft horde, the number of SGI users amounts to a rounding error.""
One particular quote I found interesting is, ""In the SGI hobbyist world it's not six degrees of separation, it's three, often less. I recently met one of the industrial light and magic guys who worked on Star Wars: Episode II." I find that this happens all the time in the slightly larger Mac crowd. Easy to pick out the users and get an in-depth conversation started. Once you start you find any and all sorts of wierd and useful connections. Heck, thats mainly how I have the current job I have. Also while travelling overseas the other week I ran into a corporate Apple guy that used to work with my boss. Small world definitely, and being an active part of a small, but active community makes it even more personal.
Glad that there are opportunities for people to keep SGI going. I know I sure have looked at all of those eBay auctions at one time just to see what it was all about. At the current going price on some of the older hardware, I don't see what you have to lose.
Someone with mod points please mod this rude and off-topic post down please.
The best thing about SG workstations was(is) that they came in funky blue or green boxes rather than beige. And this was years before Apple caught onto the idea and applied it to the iMac.
Oh, they were pretty good at their job, but perhaps that's just a coincidence.
Advanced, Affordable Workstations for Creative and Technical Professionals
Silicon Graphics® visual workstations from SGI are designed to address the high-performance requirements of scientific, engineering, and creative professionals. SGI leverages its expertise in supercomputing, system architectures, 3D graphics, software libraries, and operating-system development to offer increasingly advanced capabilities to its affordable desktop product line. Combined with our world-class software partners' applications, Silicon Graphics visual workstations offer levels of functionality unmatched by any other desktop systems. With their features, performance, and workflow capabilities, Silicon Graphics visual workstations help you take the lead in both the quality of the work you produce and the way you produce it.
almost as thin as your reason to use "like" in the subject of the message you posted.
I was at a confernce in orlando last week, and there was a parallel conference which seemed to be mostly military simulation stuff, they seemed to be pretty strong there. Guess they moved to the more lucrative stuff.
sorry officer, left my sig in my other computer.
I learned the power of u??x on an SGI workstation about ten years ago. Being stuck on a 386sx system running dos at home I longed for an Irix machine of my own.
I saw this article last week and enjoyed reading it, but at the end I was still left wondering "WHY?" I love old radios and stereo gear so I'm not unappreciative of the nostalgia aspect, but my linux desktop now is, in most ways, just as fulfilling as the old irix system I grew to love.
They're cool looking computers, but in the end that entire stack of SGIs shown in the fellow's home office probaby has about as much power as the Nvidia/AMD box sitting on my desktop. In the end I'd rather have something gorgeously deco that I could keep around for years and upgrade as needed.
SGI made great boxes. The problem was the lack of support. Not enough third parties supported them. If you upgraded the OS, then often other vendors simply didn't bother to upgrade their offerings. Suddenly you had incompatiblity problems.
SGIs wound being great but expensive Xterminals for using your new Linux box.
I think the publicity SGI got from this end of the business helped the rest of their business. They'd probably disagree, at least at the point they got out of the business.
But via the publicity from this ariticle, /., and others talking, maybe SGI will re-think this. Heck any loss they get from low sales will be offset by the overall corporate business increase, I bet. It's worth the shot.
The whole 'UNIX workstation' market is gone.
Sun? SGI? HP? DEC?
Computers became powerful and inexpensive too fast. Clusters killed the big servers.
I have an Indy that I picked up free, and the real problem is support.
I'd like to get a more up-to-date version of Irix on it, but going from the 6.5.0 disks that I have to the most current releases is a pain. A big pain. A pain that makes the most b0rk3d RPM install look like a hot bath with a supermodel.
I don't want a full support contract from SGI - for a 150MHz machine that would be a total waste of time and money.
What I'd *love* would be a way to get a set of current disks for, say US$30, with the disclaimer "You are on your own. Don't call us, we won't call you."
I've been looking at putting Linux on it, just to have a bit more "support" on the machine. Now that the video subsystem is a bit better supported I may just do that.
www.eFax.com are spammers
They did graphics well - that's a known. But I get the impression that they both 1) didn't do much else well and 2) were surpassed by other platforms in the graphics realm.
I talk about stuff.
When it comes to video, a $2,000 Mac still doesn't have the same capabilities as an SGI machine.
I thought Macs are known for their media handling capability. The fact that you can get one of those 10+ year old SGI machines for dirt cheap now and get better video editing is a bit shocking. Then again, the quote includes the word "capabilities", so perhaps that does not necessarily reflect performance/processing speed.
An Indy, which in the early 1990s cost around $14,000, can be picked up on eBay these days for maybe $40, plus another $200 for a monitor.
$200 for a monitor? Or $10 for an adapter.
Shipping is what kills on old computer hardware. The stuff is pretty heavy, and can easily cost $50-$100 to ship it. Which in many cases is more than the unit is worth in the first place.
Reliving the dream so to speak. I still believe that SGI make some awesome gear. It may not be revered as much as it was in the past but the company still deserves some level of respect. Some of the evolutionary and revolutionary moves the company has made really have helped to shape the computer industry despite what many people like to say bagging out SGI.
Got a question about UNIX ask it here : Unix/xBSD Forum
I find that inst, even in the newer releases of IRIX, makes installing an IRIX system a chore.
Using their latest release and overlays I still have dependencies that can not be met. It can be frustrating to anyone who is used to a sane installer, like the ones provided with Solaris, HP-UX and most Linux distros.
Filesystems were not recreated sometimes when I made the install, and configurations were left on the system. I'm not a Unix god, but that is not how most operating systems install, or how I think they should work.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days?
I used an SGI Iris 24 bit color workstation with a 21" monitor back in 1990. I still get misty thinking about it. We used them for computational chemistry and visualization. Shading, transparency, GL had it all even back then. Coming as I did from a Vax 750 background, this was pretty amazing. The workstation came with a flight simulator to show off GL graphic power. These were beautiful machines, solid, well engineered. The aethetics have not been surpassed to this day. Sadly, some business guy tried to turn SGI into a PC company, and they alienated their devoted scientific and engineering users. Same thing happened to Sun except they sold out to corporate IT and big iron.
an ill wind that blows no good
Never mind my request; the offensive post is already deleted. Thanks slashdot!
I remember when @home went belly up. the headend was packing up the SGI servers that @home had there and I pulled the SGI case badge off of one of them.
I still get funny questions from friends that notice it on my antec case at home and is the best looking company/equipment logo I have ever seen.
I always wanted an Octane, but they are still going for insane prices on ebay, and today it really is not worth tinkering with anymore.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It seems to be one of those things where it all just works for you and your particular setup, or it's just a total disaster.
I unfortunately fall into the latter category.
It was interesting to read the article as I started off my UNIX Systems Administrator career in the broadcast arena. Back then, all graphics were done on SGIs. I learned "UNIX" by reading the SGI manual.
However, the article completely failed to acknowledge the stronghold SGI has in scientific 3D molecular visualization and crystallography. Most of those apps are being rewritten for Linux and *BSD, but if you go somewhere like NIH, you'll find a very large population of SGIs. I'd guess the support contracts from the various NIH institutes keep SGI alive, not to mention the sales to the CIA, NSA, and other government agencies.
Hopefully there will be a part two to this article where they explore this realm. They can interview me if they want. I'd be happy to talk about the use of SGIs in science.
Plant a tree in a developing country.
You need both Toast Titantium and the flying toasters screensaver.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
they're very expensive and less powerfull than my $1500 pc at home, but look at al the cool stuff you can make of it:
SGI casemods
espresso, anyone ?
That's asanine. Why not say, your grandma already has a nuclear power plant in her home, ever hear of [insert local nuclear plant on her grid]? Google is a server application. It's not on her desktop. In fact, Google does make applications for the desktop, but they explicitly don't run on Linux.
This mystifies me. I used to do quite alot of work on an Indy and O2's. A while back I got one for a couple of hundred dollars and promptly instlled everything I could find and I was seriously unimpressed. The OS is awesome, the interface is great, I do enjoy working on them. However, a 180 mhz CPU is still slow.
What the artical fails to explain is what these people are running on them that is so much better than what we are using on Mac's and PC's.
The Cosmo stuff was brilliant in 1997. Asa matter of fact the Cosmo World VRML editor was amazing and one of the reasons that I hesitated in selling the O2. But I did not have any video software to work with, so I would really like to know what these video people are running that is so wonderful. I am also wondering where they are getting the software to run on them. Or is it just "I use an SGI, I am cool" that helps rub elbows in the Hollywierd circuits?
BeOS has the same fanatical feel and we all know how cool the BeBox was. But I think that I would still rather a modern CPU from (insert vendor here).
I just came into posession of two teal Indigo2 boxen last week, and I gotta admit that if you're the kind of person who can have some nostalgic fun playing with a C64, an SGI box is an amazing thing to own. I lost a few hours this weekend just toying around with the demos that came with the OS.
It's also pretty surprising how responsive the thing is - about the only thing I've found so far that can make one of these babies start thrashing is a newer version of Oracle. If I can just sort out this little Holy War I've been waging with IRIX 6.2's DHCP client (and its networking set-up in general), the workstation could very well end up being a computer that I use for real work.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Those hollywood nerds just can't resist the free plug.
I think that slash dot should start billing Lucas for every reference.
Also, apple computer should get a bill for every reference.
They must have a nerd central base in hollywood where the pluggers work out of.
They probably set up twenty or thirty machines with a keyboard switcher so that they can just turn a knob and pretend like they are a different poster.
I am sick of all the apple and lucas references.
So stop it.
#1. Their machines are still propietary. they are using their using Altix system but require an ATI FireGL card. ummm.. no thanks. which brings us to #2. #2. we are now using exclusively windows and linux. my machine(our machines) run faster, smoother and have the latest openGL libraries, functionality. when we want to get a new GPU we get one, take out the old card and plug the new one in. #3. $$$$.. and lots of it. lets say you want to get a cluster with 5 CPU's, along with a host node. each node has a Geforce 6800, 4GB of RAM, 3.6 Ghz CPU's, you buy the software for it, and all the outs and ins of the system. on average this system will cost you $80,000. to buy one SGI box that is inferior to this cluster, even a small SGI supercomputer would not outperform it plus just the MAINTENANCE on this SGI will cost you $80,000 or more per year. this is what it would cost to REPLACE your old cluster after just one year with the latest graphics cards, latest processors and you still have maintenance that costs nothing compared to that. i think we can all agree what the obvious choice of computing power is.
I was working in a simulation firm when the times shifted for SGI. We had some SGI RE2's that cost us about 200k £, expencive stuff in other words. My boss gave me an assignment in 1996 to find a graphics card for PC's that we could run our simulator on, and I heard rumour about a company with ex SGI guys that had started to make graphics cards for the PC market. I got the stats for a new SLI card they had made, and was asoniced of what they had in fillrates and such. My co-workers frowned at the stats thinking it was a hoax, but I convinced my boss on a gut feeling to buy the 2k £ card. We actually got a bundle deal with a company called OpenGVS that made 3D API, so it was a good deal. The card lived up to our expectations. When talking to SGI at several occations I got a taste of their arroganse when it came to the PC graphics boards, they rightfully claimed that it was no match for their super-computers, since it was missing FSAA, AF. Still I was getting the idea that their machines were very overpriced, they were in 1996 selling desktops like the Indigo2 for 20k £ and these DID NOT EVEN HAVE TEXTURING ! Now we have PC cards that have FSAA and AF with higher resolutions for a fraction of the price. PC's are so cheap that simulator companes now use one PC per projector, where a SGI have to split its screen into one area for each projector. No wonder they failed to keep the market, they will have to blame themselfs for their arrogance.
Years ago, as a joke and a dig against the trademarking of a word, I decided that the plural of 'zerox' is 'zeroxen'. But the plural of box is still boxes.
I love it, though.
Back when SGI's best people split and left to form 3DLABS (or NVIDIA - Forget which. I am sure someone out there will point out that I could have looked it up, but I don't care - my point is still valid), the heads at SGI didn't want to sell just a Video Card. So all those talented people decided to leave and make globs of money (and my 6800 and I thank them!). SGI only wanted to sell their overly priced 100% solution. And by the time they did sell PCs, it was overpriced and way too late.
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
sure there might be some marriages out there like Sun & IBM but the numbers are growing smaller. a 5 PC cluster was just an example. what about a 100 PC Cluster with linux? an SGI would fall to its kneees compared to this machine and cost 1/10th as much. as soon as the powers that be realize the cost/effectivness/flexiblility of the cluster environment SGI would have lost its ability to hang on to whatever they have left. if SGI could keep up with the rest of the world then i would say they would make it. but they wont be able to keep up. like one of the parent posts -- the market is moving way too fast.
"...and then they write a 'Whatever happened to' article about you."
IBM and Sun are hanging in the workstation business because they are making CPUs still. IBM's POWER architecture is thriving, especially with Mac and soon XBox variants giving them mass market reach. Sun, well, I don't know how they do it.
This is my sig.
"This is a Unix system. I know this." - Lex.
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~lloyd/tildeImages/F ilm/JPark/
Here a Sig There a Sig Everywhere a Sig Sig...
I'm a long-time 3D animator. In college I learned about 3D animation on Commodore Amiga's. I started my professional career working on a $100k SGI 4D70G. As time went by, it became a $10k Indigo. Now, a $2k Windows machine many times more powerful than those old SGI's (or Amiga for that matter). It seems like there's always a few die hards out there who just won't move on when its time. I used to have an old CP/M machine too! I'm all for nostalgia, but I like my computers fast. I recently bought an old Indigo (ironically from my alma matter). I plan to rip out the guts and mod it with a modern motherboard, etc. How's that for nostalgia?
Increase my killing power, eh?
In 1997, Clemson University spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on a state of the art network of SGI-O2's and a very expensive 8 processor server.
By 2001, my PIII/500+Voodoo 4+RH 7.3 was smoking the O2's. People with new Athlon+(GeForce||Radeon) systems were putting mine to shame. The new cheap-ass Dell workstations in the computer labs would have been better than the O2's at that point.
Spending that much money on hardware that is obsolete in less than 5 years is not a good investment.
The next year they switched to a Linux/MacOS X setup.
SGI faced the innovator's dilemma big-time; it was tricky to cannabalize their $2 billion workstation business for a $300 million graphics card market. And to move from being a full-system vendor to being a graphics card vendor. And even with all the management and business-issue problems, I noticed three problems their engineering effortsg never overcame:
- trouble with quality and shipping on time (see IMPACT)
- couldn't match/switch from 3-4-year development cycles of the workstation business to 6-month product cycles of the PC graphics card business
- engineers were loath to give up control of the chipset/box/OS in order to settle for just controlling the graphics subsystem. They tried to be a full-system player in a PC world. Given that Compaq couldn't really do it (something that was at least semi-obvious at the time), its not a surprise they, coming from the workstation space, couldn't do it with their integrated NT workstations.
- The engineers were delivering product that was differentiated but not in the areas that the biggest customers cared the most about. The benefits of UMA (unified memory architecture) graphics just weren't in sync with what the market most wanted: the fastest 3D at the cheapest price. And in the classic workstation space, polygon-pushing was what was most needed. Half their business was CAD workstations and in the end they lost that to Sun/HP/IBM who didn't have the sexy texture mapping stuff but could render polygons "good enough".
SGI also benefitted from many years from the other workstation vendors under-investing in 3D graphics. When that era ended, even the workstation business they were in got a heck of a lot more competitive.
Anyway, that's what comes to mind when I remember back to SGI in the mid-90s. In hindsight, I don't know of any silver bullets that would have gotten them out of the situation; it was death by a thousand cuts. At the time, I wondered if a merger with Apple would have made sense but it wasn't clear that the disfunctionality of the two organizations at the time would have melded into something better. Maybe a damn good CEO could have helped them carve out a more defensible role in the industry; that's the only thing that got Apple through as far as I'm concerned.
As stated in the article, you *also* need a monitor that knows how to handle the "composite on green line" thing.
;)
Some monitors do, many many others do NOT.
That's why you need the $200 monitor
If anyone can hear me, slap some sense into me But you turn your head, and I end up talking to myself
Windows NT
Inside was a collection of workstations all running very impressive (at the time) GL demos with realtime "twist this knob and rotate the champagne glass" kind of stuff.
We have at least three Origin 2000 systems, one is 96 node...so you know the demos must have helped at least some :)
If it wasn't for our Origins running Matlab I probably would not have tried linux until much later. The only reason I tried linux was to use X and run Matlab remotely.
Remebered that most software was very expencive too. In like 1996 the simplest version of the most popular 3d modelling tool on the SGI, MultiGen, cost 25k £. At the same time 3D Studio Max cost about 2.5k for the simplest version. My thought is that perhaps the greedy software companies also are too blame for why the SGI (practically) is no more...
An SGI workstation is about equal to the graphics power of a PS2. SGI learned the hard way that if you need to ride the crest of Moore's law then you need massively large capital investment to do it. Niche 'power' workstations is a dead business.
As a crystallographer, let me say that SGI had better not be depending on those support contracts. Crystallography and scientific visualization is running away from SGI as fast as it can. In the last few years support from SGI has dwindled more and more quickly, and it's now painfully obvious that they just don't give a damn about us, even though we still have a service contract. Needless to say, we don't plan on renewing the contract. Our lab has set up a few linux workstations to replace dying SGIs, and getting fixes from the community is bar none easier than getting fixes from SGI. In the former case, it's a matter of RTFMing and then asking detailed questions. In the latter case, it's a matter of hoping and praying that an SGI engineer will be able to pencil you in sometime next Tuesday.
The only crystallographic / vis software that has not been ported to linux (AFAIK) is GRASP. And several groups are working on alternatives to that even as we speak. ccp4, HKL, CNS, o, etc., etc., etc. on a decent linux box all smoke even our fastest SGI. Some users will even wait for a linux machine when an SGI is open. Which is fine by principal investigators, who have limited grant-based budgets and are now discovering that they can save up to $10k per computer by going with x86/linux.
4-star general in a one-man army.
You knew the end was nigh when they started producing PC's, and collaborating with MS on a new graphics API (which never came to fruition, of course). Then their esteemed CEO defected to become VP of MSN! Bwahahaha!
SGI is already dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
You can find many high end Sgi systems still in use in the tv and film post production facalities. For the really good effects most places run Discreet's Inferno software which runs on an Sgi Onyx or Onyx 2 depending on your software version. Nothing in the Windows or Mac markets can match the power of Inferno for visual effect.
For the record, I liked BeOS and Beboxes when they were still around. All that aside, can anyone name a single non hobbyist use of either BeOS or a Bebox? A single business that developed their product on a Bebox?
SGIs on the other hand did all kinds of stuff. Almost all digital effects in hollywood done eight years ago were done on SGIs. Even today, a shrinking but still significant amount of digital effects are done on SGI.
Maybe Jonny should do a little more research... Whatever happened to SGI is he kidding us. SGI is still here and is changing the computer industry as we speak. They have changed UNIX and now have changed LINUX. They build the baddest UNIX and Linux Server out there. And i could get into what they have done with storage as well. They make hardware like no other has. Im not going to get all into but if this guy knew anything about sgi he would know the technology they have and are making. And why dont many use such hardware? I believe its money. SGI has the most expensive hardware ever. So to you John Walsh do a little research before you title your article. Its like saying What ever happened to BMW. Just because you cant afford one and never driven one doesnt mean they arent making bad ass cars. Just means you are ignorant to what is out there.
When I worked for NASA in 2001 we had rows of Origin 2000's and also some older Challenges with NO GRAPHICS CARDS. Those machines have very good data throughput when pushing data back and forth between storage locations!
My desk is actually in an abandoned SGI regional office. They remodeled the suite to match the aesthetic of the machines - rounded, "stylized," purple, extra features that serve no functional purpose. I also have a pile of dead octanes. Those rounded, purple front covers never did seem to work properly. We have 60+ people working in an office SGI used for as little as 4.
I think the moral of the SGI story is self-evident. Times change. When cash is flowing, everything's beautiful. When shit's tight, you ditch the fluff and do what it takes to wring out what's left, even if that means ditching a great proprietary architecture and OS, and sublimating into an afterimage of what you were. Hey, it's marginally better than an Enron-like collapse. SGI old-timers may have seen their stock dwindle into nothing, but at least they still have their sabbaticals. Mmmmm, sabbatical.
I remember seeing Titanic in Mountain View and afterwards driving around the neighborhood--past Sun, SGI, and everyone else who helped make it happen. I wanted to leave notes on the companies' front doors saying "Great job on Titanic!" but didn't. :-) Not quite the point of the article but it just came to mind. I do remember back when all us PC drones looked up at Sun and SGI gear in awe.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
What a great idea! I wonder what form factor it would accomodate? This reminds me of the show "American Hotrod" on the Discovery channel where they rip the guts out of a 1969 GTO and replace it with modern stuff. Might have to try this myself.
an ill wind that blows no good
The problem with SGI was that at least the low-end Indies really sucked, at least compared to contemporary PCs, especially given their high pricing.
When I joined a friend's startup in '94 we where mightily proud to get an entry-level Indy for a super-special academic discount (we were still an academic group when we bought the machine) for 16000 DM (about 8000 EUR today). I was absolutely in love with the machine until we purchased six months later our first P5/90 for less than a quarter of the price. Running Linux 1.x it ran circles around the SGI. And it had at least 16-bit color graphics (don't remember exactly) while the SGI only had 8-bit.
Looking back this was not really surprising. SGI apparently had intended the low-end Indies as development machines and had really been tightfisted in the specifications: Only 8 bit colour graphics, the CPU was lacking 2nd level(?) cache, thus crippling the machine considerably, and to add insult to injury the machine had some stability issues and the file system (EFS, this was before XFS came up) lost data like a sieve everytime the system crashed. So we went Linux from then on for our Unixy needs and never looked back.
But admitted, I still have a weak spot in my heart for SGIs and I am really struggling every time to resist the temptation to buy some cheap SGI oldtimer everytime I encounter one on eBay. Back then, SGIs just were THE dream computer, even if all I ever used were even back then dog slow as the University didn't want to pay a fortune for SGI-branded RAM and peripherals and so they really sucked for everyday use. But they had that certain flair. It's really a pity that today there's not such a "dream computer" company anymore... takes away a lot of fun.
It sucked. But the SGI days were awesome. Still have a Challenge S and a gutted Crimson lying around. They had some great hardware and IndigoMagic was very cool too. But even then, they had lack of common apps. Ahh well, stuff comes and goes and now someone should start a museum.
I had the fortune of visiting the SGI campus this year after LinuxWorld in SF. They have a statue of the pipe logo in the front of the building.... They're keepin' the faith!
-m
http://www.invisik.com
Yep, they made some decent money when ever it came around. Everybody wanted one but only a few could afford them. Many professors wrote grants specifically to afford the stuff, but then they rarely collaborated so there were often a few big desktops but no servers :( until later... :)
I got an Indigo for FREE and thought it was so cool. Until I found out the OS was prohibitivly expensive, even today. Even IRIX 5.3 was more expensive than what I got for the box on eBay.
On and as for Open Source support, the ONLY SGIs that are supported are the O2s and their support is fledgling at best.
SGI boxes are beautiful and (for their time) powerful... but face it they're worthless to the hobbyist market.
That was probably the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference.
I wouldn't look to military simultion for an example of a growth area. Some of the simulators are as old as the planes themselves, 30 years and older, with upgrades every three to five years to keep them up to date. FORTRAN is still the universal language, or at least the F77 dialect. C is starting to take over, but slowly, and Ada still has a sizable presence. In general, technologies and practices lag five to ten years behind the rest of the commerical world.
On the other hand, it is fairly secure work if you can get it. Lots of people can start in simulation and retire in it, which isn't true of a lot of industries. If you can get a security clearance, you are in even better shape.
So, don't worry about international outsourcing - just become a military contractor!
"Hey, I know this. It's UNIX!"
Apple's moving much more in a consumer electronics direction than in a computing direction, but I still think it would have been interesting if Apple had bought SGI while they were developing OS X.
Both companies had a solid niche in computer graphics; SGI's in 3D visualization, and Apple's in 2D design. Apple was going to introduce a UNIX based operation system, IRIX is a UNIX based operating system. Both companies are involved in computing, but not so much in the transactional data processing side that HP/IBM/Sun are involved in, and neither one was ever in the position to make meaningful moves in that market. Both had clientelle willing to spend more on their products than the products of their more direct competitors to get either their specialized hardware or software.
I think it would have benefitted Apple by giving their products more industrial/data center credibility, in addition to general upward mobility for hardware and software, especially in the 3D visualization realm. SGI on the other hand would have gotten access to more mainstream applications (in their late 90s heydey you COULD get stuff like Photoshop for the SGI) and easier integration with a desktop-priced computer.
In the end if it was done right, I think you could have had a really cool computing environment based on a common operation system. Research departments or other entities with uniqure requirements could have been "all Apple" with desktop Macs and machine-room servers all sharing the same user interface and capable of running the same applications (think fat binaries with MIPS and PPC, instead of PPC and 68K).
It might have led to some interesting clustering concepts integrating the desktops and the big boys for shared/distributed computing, NUMA, and other stuff.
Anyway, I think there was an interesting business case for such a merger. Most Apple fans (often rudely) disgree, and think of Apple as perpetually a personal computer/consumer electroncis company when I thought they could have been and done more. Oh well, it's too late now.
When I read the headline I saw 'SG1' as in Stargate SG1 and was thinking 'Yeah.. too many re-runs, Not the same anymore'.. then read through the comments and realized you were talking about the SGI workstations! DOH!
I think 'innovate or die' sums it up.
"Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days? "
Whatever happened to a period?
Back before they shrunk their name, Silicon Graphics Inc. had some fun stuff to play with but even in the glory days I wouldn't believe how overpriced it was.
I've used the green boxed machines (their name escapes me), the Iris, the Indy, the O2, and a whole bunch of "oven" machines. All of them very nice to play with but all of which were very expensive. These where the guys who came up with IrisGL which was the forerunner to OpenGL. They went "64-bit" early too although they did it the wrong way (changing the OS moniker to "IRIX64" broke many Makefiles). All was right and good...as long as there was no one else in the same product space.
It was around the mid 90s when several new things started to pop up. Sun and HP noticed how SGI was a "darling" and wanted in on the action and tried to create their own "graphics workstation" both of which weren't as nice and often times a lot cheaper. Around this time, as well know, a little OS known as Linux started to get some steam and a little project known as Mesa started to actually conform to OpenGL.
So now they had pressure from the top and the bottom. I also viewed their buying Cray as a bad move because it didn't make their technology any cheaper to compete against Sun and HP let alone the cheap Windows or Linux workstation with a semi-decent AGP card.
The last SGI machine I saw ran Windows 2K. Such a shame because it was still way overpriced from what you could buy "off the shelf". Maybe things would have been different if they embraced Open Source to cut down the overhead. I honestly don't know. Retreating into the supercomputer product space made me notice how much they were the Amiga/Commedore of the 90s. They were too pretty, too expensive, too early.
Although not actually Acorn.
SGI helped grow (accidently - probably by being too short termist) MANY graphics firms. 3dfx had a good number of ex-SGI staff, nVidia has oodles of them, some are at MS working on D3D (when SGI dropped the ball on OpenGL - it didn't keep up the the HW), 3DLabs has a couple but 3DLabs was always a competitor of SGI (and 6000 miles away!). Most famously is ArtX who I _think_ did the GPU for the Gamecube but are now wholey owned by ATi. Many of the ArtX team had worked on the RIP in the N64 then split away as SGI seemed to drop the ball on that one too.
There's probably more than that. Sorry to be so down on SGI but they REALLY let things go badly wrong....
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I used to fight with the older Linux systems do perform something very powerful and efficient, being mocked by those around me because of the difficulties involved. I understand this all too well. I have heard more computer "nerds" around here put down Unix simply because they could not figure it out or had known-incompatible hardware.
Click here or here.
I use an SGI workstation all the time - it's the only computer lab our school will give our programming class unlimited use of. Huge 21" monitors connected to these IRIX machines everyone hates. You can't do anything practical on them; only SSH into the main server and X window emacs or something.
3D Graphics and modeling? I'd be happy to have something newer than Netscape 4 that runs decently.
SGI didn't go anywhere. Who told you they were gone? They are wrong. They are very much alive and doing better than ever. I don't understand who started the rumor, but it hasn't any basis in fact at all. You should see what they are doing with Jet fighters recently. If you only knew!
I was an SGI employee during the "glory days', and got to watch the company go downhill until I got laid off in the umpteenth wave of "rightsizing". But in spite of the layoff, I love SGI. The only problem with SGI was that they were just too d@mn good at everything. They treated their employees like kings. Their pay was 10-20% above their competitors. They had free sodas and gourmet coffee for employees *before* the dot.com boom. Their machines were always the best-of-the-best. Most powerful CPUs, best graphics, most user friendly OS. Their suppot staff were highly trained degreed EEs who actually knew how the comuters worked down to the circuit level, not fresh-out-of-highschool dweebs with a 3-month certificate in micros@ftology. What happended to SGI is an allegory for what has happened to America in general. Cheap mass-produced commodity junk has taken the profit out of the market, and forced everyone to lower their standards. Veyr much like the SouthPark episode "Something Wallmart this way comes." Ultimately we will all end up buying $100 dollar commodity computers, not because they are good or powerful, but because they will be all we can afford on our $10/hr jobs as janitors of the Microsoft plumbing.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
It is terrible that Slashdot is JUST running this story. It was published on November 26, what's that... almost 3 weeks ago?
Slashdot late to the draw. Google this using site:news.news.com sgi ....
I wasn't aware that the "toaster" was an actual sort of proper name for the O2s. I thought we made that up. Hell, they do look like toasters, so I guess anyone could have come up with that...
Speak for yourself.
Back in the mid-80s these puppies cost $50-60k each. For that price we got 4MB of RAM (yes, MEGAbytes), a 15.67 MHz 68020 processor, and no X-Windows. Their windowing environment at the time was something called "mex", which was probably worse to use than twm. But their graphics capability for the time was unmatched.
My name's even in the SGI 2000 FAQ. We used to walk their support people through hardware problems, because we knew the hardware better than they did.
We eventually upgraded to the Indy, then jumped all the way to the Onyx with Reality Engine. Took a long break from SGI, but starting to play with their Altix 350 these days.
Man, things change!
I mod down all the "free iPod"-sig losers.
I just retired an Octane from service. We stopped running Irix on it and switched to NetBSD because Irix was such a security nightmare. My favorite crack on SGIs' was "All of the worse bits of Solaris and Macintosh all rolled up into one." Probably unfair, becuase ours was a sturdy little machine. I loved the way the peripherals slid in an out on their own chassis.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
"you do realize that an O2 will still kick the crap out of the best Apple or Pc you can buy for 3d and video work?"
Yep, you're right. Those awesome MIPS R12000 CPUs at 300Mhz really blow the doors off modern 2.5Ghz G5s and 3+Ghz Xeons and Opterons.
What's the O2 now, 10 YEARS old?
Upon re-reading my comment, I think I was a little harsh on SGI's support. We've always gotten what we asked for. Sometimes is was a little late in coming. And sometimes we wondered why we even needed to ask (e.g. DVD-ROM support in mid-2004). And sometimes it's taken a lot of back-and-forth to really get a solution. But, in their favor, SGI has always been decent about supporting their platform. They just can't keep up with an army of talented volunteer pros and hobbyists.
4-star general in a one-man army.
Even though that Belluzo idiot nearly killed the company they still kick some ass in the high end graphics arena. Almost every film made in Hollywood is edited with Inferno on high end SGI Onyx boxen. Movie quality image processing requires insane amounts of bandwidth and storage, and SGI still reigns supreme there. Some day the PC will catch up, but not just yet.
Then Microsoft bought Softimage, and made them come out with an NT version. The first serious OpenGL graphics cards (DirectX was stil in the future) came from vendors like Fujitsu and Dynamic Pictures. They didn't work very well. Installation required direct cooperation with the board developers. But they did have the 4x4 matrix multiplier for geometric transforms and a hardware Z buffer, just like an SGI machine.
That's when the studios started gettting NT-based animation systems. They weren't standard desktop PCs at first, though. Intergraph sold "high end NT workstations", and it was worth it simply because they could make the graphics board play nice with the motherboard. Softimage on NT on the DEC Alpha had a following.
One real issue for a few years was that it was seen as "unprofessional" to be using a PC for animation. At one point I had a Pentium Pro in a black rackmount case, and industry people asked me where they could get one like that, so their shop would look "professional".
Then came mainstream motherboards with AGP slots, and finally, the graphics board had enough memory bandwidth to work right. Then serious graphics boards went mainstream, and it was all downhill for Silicon Graphics after that.
They were overpriced because of the way they were sold. They had a boat load of overpriced sales people who worked on big commisions selling and the the market switched to buying machines that were a commodity, that people bought off a website or from a snail-mail cataloge.
I blame the greedy sales team for the death of SGI.
From TFA: I recently met one of the industrial light and magic guys who worked on Star Wars: Episode II.
So, is it true they really have cloven hooves, horns and a tail?
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
"one guy has a 128CPU Origin2000"
seriously, a hobbyist with a 128 CPU machine? Wow, that's some hobby. I'm quite happy with 24CPUs in one box but work paid for that one...
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
(I used to work at sgi back in the 90's)
sgi used to have this ad campaign "ignite your mind". well, other things could also get ignited.
whenever a whole group was moved from one building to another (we had about 25 buildings in the mtn view campus), it was inevitable that some of the power supplies would crap out due to the move. either the stress of being running/hot 7x24 for so long and then a weekend (usually) of off-time, then monday being turned on - not sure what it was, but it was SO common to lose a high percent of power supplies during a group-move. I later learned that this was common and the power supplies on sgi desktops weren't exactly the highest quality.
also, at the time, the octane was the hip machine to have. but the octane had a problem with - uh - catching on fire. sometimes.
(octane. fire. heh.)
and we also used to sell lots of those 'hot octanes' to oil and gas companies. yikes!
therefore:
SGI: ignite your mind. and any nearby flammables.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The whole 'UNIX workstation' market is gone.
Sun? SGI? HP? DEC?
Computers became powerful and inexpensive too fast. Clusters killed the big servers.
IBM seems to still sell POWER servers.
And as for *nix workstation, whaddya call a Mac used as a workstation?
Mac - largest installed *nix base
Mac - largest installed RISC base
Mac - thriving
Hehe, funny stuff. Our RE2 catched fire after beeing in a small room a whole weekend with no cooling ;)
And if you look really closely, it's hard to understand why.
keep you special firends to yourself.
The best of both worlds?
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Read The Inquirer over the next few days, there might be something there that changes your mind about the whole topic. Don't count SGI out yet, there are some BIG surprises coming really really soon. If you like this kind of thing, it will make you smile, a lot.
-Charlie
(No, I won't scoop my own story on a slashdot post, so don't even ask)
A few years later, after the SGI had fallen apart and was long since replaced by a far cheaper NT Workstation running the newly ported-to-NT Softimage|3D, I went out and bought a PDA to assist me with my meeting and contact organization.
I was flipping through the technical specs in the manual when I ran across:
Casio Cassiopeia E-100/105 Info
Processor: Mips R4000
ROM CPU: 131 MHz
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I'm guessing here, but my dad was (still is even though its 30 years since he worked with it) a crystallographer, and back then they used huge container sized computers with the power of a small Casio calculator to calculate the advanced stuff. OK their stuff was not as advanced as today and visualization didn't exist but still..
Software wise, back then it was all "open source" even though they didn't call it that. Proprietary software simply didn't exist within advanced science AFAIK. They wrote their own and exchanged with other universities. If the stuff they wanted to use didn't exist for the architecture they could port it.
The Nintendo 64 had a MIPs processor and a SGI designed 3D graphics system based on the Reality Engine. And Mario 64 was the greatest 3d game of its time.
WhatMeWorry!
The US Postal Service has thousands of SGI O200 and 1100 computers in use as backend processors for image recognition. Any time you send a letter, an image of the mail piece is sent to a system with racks of them, to be recognized on custom software from Lockheed-Martin. The O200s are actually not bad computers, they have a lot of ram and fast scsi drives, and quad Mips processors running between 200 and 400 Mhz, although parts for them are fantastically expensive. Of course they are running IRIX. The 1100s are just 1U rackmount dual proc Pentium IIIs running linux. One of the main reasons IRIX was used was the availability of an OSI networking stack, which is used to communicate to some of the ancient-but-still-working-well sorting machines. The strange thing about all this is that I am usually the first one to evangelize the networking abilities of Linux, but I've never seen an OSI stack for it.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Only difference w/ Amiga though is they weren't any more expensive than PCs (and some cost even less) unless you wanted a full-blown A3000 tower + Video Toaster, which of course cost you a few thousand $$ more than a PC, and for good reason: it got you the same exact system that video professionals were using at the time!
I remember wanting to buy an SGI Indigo in 1995/1996 and not having enough cash. Ditto with DEC Alpha 21164. But my A1200+HD only cost me about $400 in 1992, and so was in fact cheaper than typical 386/486 systems at the time. You could get an A4000 for about the same as a typical PC. In 1994 I built myself a fairly conservative 486 PC (only 486dx/33, 4 MB RAM, and 120 MB disk) and it cost me about $1300, OS not included...
Amiga lost its edge in the end though, what with the AAA chipset never getting produced. Wish they'd stuck around, I liked the platform a lot more than PC.
Then there is the issue of their equipment, reliability and price. The best machine I had from them was the SGI XL. The origin machines were a pain, lots of trouble.
There's about 5 octanes sitting around my office. I was using one for a while until I abandoned it for a two-headed linux box. I got sick of having to download every tool I was used to using... wget, gaim, lynx, etc. It was noisy too.
The high point of Congo (for those foolish enough to have seen it) were the SGI laptops in the abandoned base in the jungle. Unfortunately, they were also the only high point (by high, I mean above sea level)...
The glory days of SGI were well before the boom peaked. By 1999 the company was starting to fizzle. I worked there as a contractor just as the the glory days drew to a close and the mass layoffs began, 97-98. My $500 cheap-ass white box with a GEforce MX can outperform anything made in those days, at least until the cheap-ass fan melts or something lame like that.
Nevertheless, only a couple years ago I worked at a place where they were still buying used and new Octanes by the pallet load. The researchers had molecular-modeling tools that worked well on IRIX, and why change - these days hardware manufacturers go under faster than the complex software models one uses can be redone (and migrate all that legacy data!), then you can buy used for dirt-cheap. Eventually we figured out all the magic we needed to get OpenGL to outperform the Octanes on cheap-ass white boxes, and the takeover began...
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
It's the Google Cool Campus now.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
What a weak article. It talks about the current cult like following of SGI, but says nothing about what actually happened to the company. Why did it die, who killed it, mis-managed? Surely they could have kept in the market if it weren't for inept directors and managers. I don't want to hear how the PC market or Mac market killed them, they could have, and should have, kept a leg up on future technologies.
If you talk to any of the animators from Star Wars Episode 1 you'll hear them bitch and moan about having to use SGI O2 workstations. They were running commerical apps like Maya and Softimage, but also ILM's own compositing and animation software on what was basiclly SGI's very lowest end machine. Many even had very low end CPUs that wern't upgraded until long into the project. Meanwhile over at Pixar, they were doing much simpler animation on Octane/Octane2 systems, machines that were an easy 2x faster for CPU (4x faster if you did dual proc) and an easy 4x faster for 3D. A far better fit.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/13/1 321227
When we asked SGI how much it would cost to put an 8 gig drive in our Indy in 1995, they said $500 per hour, minimum of 2 hours. Just to put a hard drive in. Or RAM. Or anything.
$1000.
I eventually figured out how Irix did things and put it and several others in myself.
I'm so glad we moved to Macs.
John
I dealt with SGI at the academic level. In the mid 1990s, their hardware was unbelievable. Even their mid-range machine, the Indigo2 IMPACT had far better 3D than just about anything else on the market. Their Onyx RealityEngine2 was almost an order of magnitude better and was quickly replaced by InfiniteReality which was far better yet. The stuff we worked on was horrendously expensive, but probably worth every penny.
By the late 1990s their upgrade cycle came to a stop for awhile. The CPUs we'd been told were in the pipline were suddenly canceled or put on hold. The next huge graphics update was also halted. Meanwhile their sales drones tried to see us snazzy but overpriced and underperforming PCs and PC servers. At least the LCD for the PCs was wicked cool (and worked on O2, yay... but why not Octane??) WTF? A year later, they came back to us trying to see us an even crappier line of totally generic PCs. Models that weren't even compatible with their neat widescreen LCD without the use of a $500 adapter. Double-WTF?? Shortly after I heard they bought Intergraph but halted future development. Triple-WTF???
I think they finally realized the PC thing was silly and started work on their traditional iron again. But this time the updates came slow and were not all that large. Instead of a totally new CPU, they just made the old model faster. Instead of totally new graphics, they just did a 25% speed boost and doubled the RAM. Granted it's hard to complain about 1024 MB texture RAM and 10240 frame buffer RAM (yes, 10 GB). But was still based on original 1995 design and OpenGL 1.1.
One of the last straws for us is when they started to honk the Linux horn again, telling us how much better thier Altix was over the Origin, even though they had been pimping the Origin 3000 to us just a few months earlier. Their new graphics engine was now just a bunch of V12 cards ripped out of Octanes and grafted into an Origin. A little later they began using ATI FireGL cards.
SGI has been slipping downhill ever since about 1997. As time goes on, they slide faster and make even more bizzare moves. They always seem to have at least one really impressive piece of kit, but these days they bounce around so much that they don't keep a customer for very long. I just recently heard about some impressive sales numbers for the (old but fast) InfiniteReality4 graphics to gov't vizsim clients (simulators and such) and to Discreet for Inferno HD/Film editing and effects workstations. Yet I also heard that these will be discontinued in a few months.
These days SGI likes to jump from one bandwagon to the next and they really love to tell their customers what they should want and what they should buy. It might have worked back when all of their gear was top shelf, but it sure doesn't work anymore.
Maybe they'll stick with Altix long enough to regain some ground. Time will tell...
SGI also had a big problem with their marketing efforts.
In around 96-97, I read a report from a top computer magzine reviewing supercomputers, but to my suprise, SGI Power Challenge series was not mentioned at all, even though they talked about automotive and pharmaceutical industies which were traditional SGI grounds.
and you should be able to download the
latest "maintenence" release (NEVER EVER
use the "feature" release) of IRIX,
sans any speciallized drivers. The last
time I did (about 2 years ago), the gzipped
archive was about 950 MB. If you unpack
it on another *nix machine, you could do
a remote install easily enough (presuming
you have the needed disk space free for
the new OS). In my experience, each new
iteration of IRIX has consumed more disk
space, which might be a consideration.
IRIX is/was the very best *nix I ever used.
A sane "init" procedure, absolutely tight
integration between the OS and the GUI (unlike
CDE), and outstanding filesystems (XFS is now
available on GNU/linux thanks to SGI). There
is even a slew of F/OSS available for D/L from
SGI, precompiled.
highway of death simulation.
The graphics processor in the Nintento GameCube came from SGI.
Hi, can anybody tell me if there is an affordable SGI machine that is still usefull today? I do lots of video related work and would love to use a SGI machine. Maybe for capturing or something like that? Thanks Hendrik
No.
Sorry, but I didn't want an OS that was even harder to use than DOS. Linux didn't have much appeal to me even five years ago, I can't imagine what it must have been like ten years ago.
The webserver linked into in the article http://www.nekochan.net runs of an SGI O2 and is holding up under the /. ing pretty well--it hasn't even used swap yet.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
That was the same conferance that Smalltalk has a sizable presence.
[Borrowed from a Smalltalk newsgroup posting]
Many older monitors didn't check for proper synch frequency. and they synch the power supply swithing to the horizontal scan, so if you went too high you could pop the flyback switcher. But that's moot now that most all monitors have a cpu chip.
Anyway five years would put it back about 99, so I misspoke (duh, I was using linux in 99, although not on the desktop). Seems I'm getting old now and can't keep track of time...
I still run an Octane to do all my compositing & editing. Sure, FCP has the interoperability I need [lol Irix and its deplorable Quicktime support], but for superfast workflow, nothing beats it. Our brand new dual proc G5 is a dog for most of the render intensive stuff we do more or less in real-time on the Octane.
OK, the company that makes the software I use is more or less out of the picture, and getting hardware support is $++. You can't have it all, I guess.
i worked for sgi in the late 90s until they decided to more or less "give" the odyssey hardware team to nvidia... but i digress: i definitely recall coming into work in bldg 43 and noticing that acrid smell of burnt inductors from a fried octane power supply about 2-3x a month, indicating that someone was about to show up for work and find a surprise under their desk! those suckers sure kicked out the smoke when they gave way!
sigh. but i sure do miss that place, and the people i worked with.
xxxxx@indycar.engr.sgi.com
You can still find SGI IRIX OS boxed sets on
eBay -- you don't have to go to SGI for them.
With the Indigo workstation series, having
the original OS and driver CDs is useful. The
best bet is an IRIX 6.5.x boxed set, and D/L
the latest "maintenence" release directly from
SGI (free SupportFolio registration required).
F/OSS is available precompiled from SGI's website,
for nearly any IRIX workstation. If you are
looking for "free" SGI branded software, you
are out of luck. But with a fully functional
GCC, you can build from source nearly any F/OSS
package that isn't already available in binary
from them.
I must disagree with you regarding value in the
hobbyist market -- any time I want to check my
code against the OpenGL standard, all I have to
do is recompile it on the SGI.
AFAIK, momory for the Indy is still available
from 3rd parties like Kingston. The Indy's
memory can be expanded out to 256 MB, which
will make it "sing".
The toaster term was applied to O2s by marketing folks trying to signal that it could act equivalently to the conventional definition of a video toaster, an Amiga running NewTek stuff.
you've been karma whored.
I really have to find it interesting reading all the good points made in many comments posted regarding SGI, as well as the differing viewpoints. The main consistency I see both as a former SGI user/reseller/proponent gone PowerMac is that while there are large reasons to compare the two, you have to compare apples to apples (no pun intended) when comparing the two manufacturers. Comparing high-end reality engine powerstations to a Dual 2.5 G5 is comparing two products in different product categories. I recently had a long discussion with a friend of mine from SGI about this that helped put my perspective into a better place.
SGI as a company has several different product lines (despite how technologies from each tend to find ways into the other) from workstations to visualization powerstations to high end servers and node clusters with hot-swappable modules and units. If you look at how SGI has refocused their markets after all the fun stuff from the mid 90s took place, they're still a very prominent and powerful force to be reckoned with. They simply aren't doing a lot of what people got to know them for anymore. One of SGI's big focuses has always been high end visualization and CAD/CAM/CAE, and technologies that cater to governmental/military customers. To say that they have gone out of the supercomputing business because Macs have taken over is just silly, since the two don't even compete in the same market.
SGI Product line offerings are Servers, Visualization System, Storage, and then Workstations. Apple's product line offerings are consumer PCs, Workstations, and Servers. While it is very likely that the SGI 3D Modeling/Rendering Entertainment based workstation is being succeeded by the PowerMac G5 with 3D applications like Alias Maya (formerly SGI's Alias|Wavefront), Lightwave 3D, and Luxology; and video/compositing applications such as Final Cut Pro HD and Shake (recently purchased by Apple), you're still looking at people who run these workstations for things like broadcast and advanced 3D graphics such as Discreet Logic working on SGI and linux only, and Softimage only on Intel hardware via XP and Linux. We're talking about different target markets here in the grand scheme of things.
-Apple is coming from a personal computer arena and working it's way into the professional arena (and doing a dang good job, I might add).
-SGI has been in the proffessional arena for years and has survived as many blunders and messes as such corporations do, and was never meant for the personal computing arena.
-Intel based machines has such a wide variety of are found from the personal to profesional arena thanks to the growth of the original Windows NT 4.0 engine and Linux.
Has Apple gained a lot of marketshare since switching to OS X and with the release of the PowerMac G5? Most certainly. Alias Maya is one of the hottest packages available for 3D modeling and animation out there today and has been ever since it began competing with SoftImage back in the late 90s. Final Cut Pro HD is becoming more and more comparable to programs like Fire and Smoke with Shake being the up and comer for programs like Inferno, Flint, Flame, Combustion, and Lustre.
Does this mean that they have every single benefit of an SGI in competing? Not really. As someone mentioned in a previous comment, the graphics cards that run in SGI systems have some amazingly high end features that you will simply not get in a consumer end or even prosumer graphics card from ATI or nVidia, and have been since the cobalt graphics chipsets from the Indigo2's and O2's all the way through the Octane and up to the Onyx. Does this mean that Apple will never have such support? Not necessarily. Apple is slowly becoming what the SGI workstation was originally in place to do. A high powered unix workstation with multiple professional configurations for 3D, Audio/Video, Visualization, and simulation. SGI has had the foothold on this for quite sometime and the Mac is now capable of catching up. Who knows, they may even suc
http://www.mood-indigo.org/
Thumbs up!
peb
Octane 1 w/ 1 GigRAM 195Mhz
Octane 1 w/ 1 GigRAM Dualpro 300Mhz
and no problems w/ heating in his working room
Actually, processing power matters greatly in modern macromolecular structure. Many new programs or techniques require a lot of computing time, either because their implementation is brute-force (that's sometimes what gives the best results), or because what they're trying to do is so hoary. Of course, some programs just blaze by and require only seconds of processor time. But others are only possible in the era of cheap, fast computers.
For example, I'm currently processing data from a technique known as small angle X-ray scattering. Producing a consensus model of the scattering molecule takes a week on a 2.4GHz processor with 2GB of RAM. And that's for a relatively *small* molecule (46 kilodaltons). A friend is working with a molecule 40 times as large (a 2 megadalton complex), and his job has been running for almost a month with no sign of convergence.
4-star general in a one-man army.