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SGI's Visual PC
CSD writes "As
I was surfing for news bits this morning I noticed that the
guys over at Ars Technica have
an in-depth review of the new SGI NT box. Apparantly they
got hold of a 320 model. I figured this was OK content for
this site as well, since people are clammoring to know about
Linux support, and from some of the hardware mentioned in
this review, it leaves room for doubt about Linux working
on it w/o some major tweaks. " If SGI is smart, they've
got an army of hackers making sure these 'tweaks' are ready
as soon after this bugger is announced.
Update: 01/05 11:50 by CT :
afniv writes "In
an interview with
SGI CEO Rick Belluzzo regarding the launch of the new "NT
workstation", he discusses the new direction of SGI and
the fact that he "can't go on a customer visit without
somebody asking about Linux." "
Do you have any Linux plans?
Linux is increasingly important. I can't go on a customer visit without somebody asking about Linux. Basically, people want the robustness of Unix, but they want a more vendor approach to it. We will look at it, and I believe we will have some announcements about that in the future.
From this techweb article
Oh yeah, this thing as shown is $1,299.
ooh Crap I got drool all over the place reading that review.
...mmmm Yum Yum....
I have to say I was sadly disappointed when I heard SGI was going Intel/WinNT's way.....
Well Not no more ( well I'll be looking for linux too ) but wow.... That thing sounds incredible... their crossbar architecture in a pc! 3.2gig per second video..... Yikes!!!
If it weren't for the 48pin ram I'd say the new SGI is beyond perfect, but hey I'll still take one... PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE..... and being able to use serious CAD and animation stuff on it (ofcourse)
Now if I can only scroung up $4000.... I cant help but wonder who has a chance to compete against SGI in the high end workstaion market with one of these babies.....
Having used an O2 and IndigoII it sure sounds like SGI has pulled another rabbit out of their ass and come up with one amazing product
So everyone go buy one..... especially if it will run linux in the near future
I was recently at an SGI training session on these babies. I can't go into too much detail ... but they DO know about linux. In fact, "Does this machine support Linux" was even mentioned as the #2 question in their FAQ. It is an intel processor, but the chip set is a brand new offering from SGI... and there is no bios.
... but are going to be pretty pricy. SGI has STRONG ties with MS and Intel on this baby.
These machines looked very hot
I have to say I was sadly disappointed when I heard SGI was going Intel/WinNT's way....
It is still saddening to see yet another vendor of a decent architecture have to surrender to become just another mediocre wintel crowd
Just if they had a real processor, not a pile of kludges on top af a 8086, and a real os, not windoze...
*So everyone go buy one..... especially if it will run linux in the near future*
:)
Hmm...ok, lemme go run get my extra couple thousand I keep around just for cool stuff...
Ian... a little slow on the uptake huh buddy...maybe its to early for ya... I was being facisious, that is I was joking.... I dont expect that average person to buy one of these but you have to admit they are incredible machines
I'm all for putting Linux on these things, but what I'm really interested in is BeOS. Any word or insight into the possibility of getting Be on them?
--
Michael Chisari
Takes the cake....
mee too ! :-) Except for some not-supported-by-anyone-but-SGI-proprietary hardware it's just another NT box. My guess is that it's just something to keep the revenue up until they can manage to get bought by another pc-manufacturing company. (like Compaq bought Digital) Perhaps Dell or Packard-Bell will buy SGI ? PRESS RELEASE ------ Great synergies bla bla bla complete service offering bla bla will still support IRIX hah hah hah... ------ Well, the shareholders will be happy I guess.
*So everyone go buy one..... especially if it will run linux in the near future*
:)
Hmm...ok, lemme go run get my extra couple thousand I keep around just for cool stuff...
Ian... a little slow on the uptake huh buddy...maybe its to early for ya... I was being facisious, that is I was joking.... I dont expect that average person to buy one of these but you have to admit they are incredible machines
they are owned. plus there isn't any real linux application base for the kind of apps a typical sgi user needs -- CAD, CAM, accelerated OpenGL.
although it might be fairly easy for some of the high end cad/graphics companies to port to linux, there would be some significant resistance due to the hi rate of updates and changes in linux. MS might be broken, but it stays consistently broken for years. it's crazy, but a lot of people find that preferable to frequent sw updates.
don't get me wrong, but i think sgi is just another elite box manufacturer that's trying to survive in a world where knock-off clones are rapidly approaching their products in performance, at substantially lower cost.
pc's might have crippled busses and coorespondingly low performance because of it, but i suspect the life of this sgi product will be somewhat short-term as pc's continue increasing performance.
the money products of the future will be increasingly be software driven, at least until the appliance era kicks in (5 yrs?)
on the other hand, getting linux on this thing right away, with full accelerated OpenGL support, plus some announcements of kewl warez for it, would do a lot to restore faith in sgi within the engineering community.
but you have to ask yourself "Is sgi willing to pee in billgatus' cheerios?" -- i doubt it. not with all their key mutimedia/cad/cam apps being ported to NT.
Gumber sez:
How so?
The rumours I've heard (from a reliable source) is that SGI has been playing with Linux themselves on these boxes and apparently it runs just fine :-)
Rasmus
Word from an employee at sgi. They have a tiny group of people working on linux.
I can confirm, also from a very good source, that SGI has had Linux running for some time on their upcoming Visual Workstations.
Since the VW's are IA32, the time to port was not all that significant.
AFAIK, at this time, support for the graphics subsys (X server) is lacking.
Yep, and now they're moving to utter crap.
a powerful set of menu-based utilities to tune and administrate the hardware
if "administrate" is a verb, i'm charles de gaulle.
other than these look pretty groovy.
Earl Kearney
erl@takemetoyourlieder.com
I'll agree with you on NFS. I've had a few problems getting IRIX to NFS nicely with other platforms or even older versions of IRIX. But generally they weren't too difficult to solve after consulting the documentation.
But in general I've always wondered why people seem to hate IRIX so much. I use IRIX, Solaris and Linux extensively and HP-UX, AIX, and Digital Unix to a much lesser extent. I've consistently found IRIX to be a joy to use compared to any of these. It's much easier to administrate, documentation is generally quite complete and easy for a novice to find, and it includes a lot of the little "goodies" that make my life easier as an everyday user (tcsh included, Freeware CD, etc). I'm not enough of a kernel guru to comment on differences there, but in my opinion IRIX beats any of the other commercial offerings in userland. The only area where Linux lags IRIX there is in ease of administration. And the distributions are quickly catching up. Yes, I know that all the others can be configured with all the GNU stuff and tweaked, etc, (I wouldn't use one seriously without that stuff) but their default configurations are horrible to work with. If I need to do some work on someone else's machine that I haven't setup to my liking, IRIX or Linux are most likely to be the least painful to deal with. Time and time again I've found that "out of the box" IRIX requires far less configuration to be a powerful, convenient working environment.
I'm really not trying to start a religious war, just giving my $0.03 (inflation).
Just like the iMac (which went to 1,199 today with a 6 gig HD and 266mhz processor, BTW). Which only goes to show, THE IMAC IS A DIFFERENT PRODUCT, and it's selling pretty damn well, so every time I see slashdotters blast Mac for this reason, I laugh out loud.
i'm not sure what your reply means -- i'll stand by my post.
the apps that made sgi (multimedia, cad, cam), and are used by most sgi multimedia companies, are not being ported to linux, they are being ported to NT. They cost thousands of dollars per user, use hardware keys, etc. Not exactly a linux app.
if you have custom apps, or some of the various OpenGL/Mesa apps that run under linux and are happy, and look forward to hardware acceleration, that's great and i'd like to see it too. but please realize that that's a completely different issue.
I have a friend that works at SGI who claims he has seen linux running on these boxes. I think the main difficulty would be in getting the graphics architecture ported over. I wouldnt be surprised if we see Linux on the boxes very soon.
I wouldn't put it past them. SGI could always breeze through the tougest of technical challenges ( how many processors at a time? ), good UNIX desktop ( when it came out), flat panel technology,etc.
/usr/etc ( is this normal? ), NFS (well, no one can get that right),and the UNIX that eats itself, the infamous irksome IRIX.
But they could never get the simple things right. Like putting ping in
So,no,Linux on Visual PCs doesn't surprise me.
The real question is how is SGI, who is in a tenuous spot as is, can open up the source, a move that generally equates to "giving up hardware secrets" ( FUD ).
I hope they won't kill the O2 line just yet. I in an molecular modelling lab on those and practically none of the software we use is available for NT. It would be a shame to see the support for low-end IRIX go... not to mention being forced to use NT.
Hey, you forgot the -O32,-n32,-64 merry-go-round!
And what about the 6.2 (6.1 too?) cadmin memory hog daemon?
IRIX is like the cute goth chick in high school. You know, the one that eould talk to you on the back of the school bus. You want to like it, its got a lot of nice..er..features, but you it's a little messed in the head.
Hold on there partner!
You got an Octane? Happy with your purchase? I'd fake being happy unitl I paid off the large sums of money (>> $10K) you paid for it. How many liquor stores did you have to rob to feed that hardware habit?
The Octanes are _old_ technology. A Visual PC 1/3 its price _should_ be able to do everyting an Octane can. Since no one has seen benchmarks, we don't know, but that is the USENET consensus ( FWIW). Here's something we have seen:
..doing about 50fps at 1600x1024 pixels, 24 bit color with a 200,000 polygon object then moving a 15 MB image around in real time(no aiting for screen redraws).
mmmmmmmmm...half-life...*BFG*( grin that is ).
You write
I can't tell you how many times I've pulled my hair out because if inconsistencies between SGI NFS implementations and the rest of the world. Even IRIX 6.x has problems exporting NFS v.3 to Solaris 2.6... and this is *after* dealing with its horrible 64bit NFS bugs (-32bitclients anyone?). Sure, IRIX scales wonderfully as an SMP kernel, but the userspace tools and many basic UNIX services have been broken for too long. Solaris is just as good a server and it *doesn't* have these problems.
Actually, from the discussions with customers I have dealt with, Sun's NFS v3 implementation was horribly broken, not being able to talk properly to the SGI's, the HP's, the AIX machines, the PCs etc. More often than not, when this customer was busy diagnosing problems with its systems, the culprit came out to be Sun or Sun OSes, and SGI, HP, and IBM had to write work-around patches to deal with the problems that Sun had. Sun was quite unwilling to support a heterogenous system.
At this customer site, old Suns are being pulled out by the truckload (I am not kidding, this is literally true) and being wholesale replaced by Octanes. Sun's are viewed generally as poorly supported, poorly performing, difficult to make interoperate/play with others. They are right, and despite Sun trying to sell by droping their price to 0, the customer has work to do, and cannot waste time fixing Sun's software for them.
As for the SGI tools being broken, this is usually the words of a long standing Sun bigot who only knows Sun-isms for commands (non-Posix/XPG4) and isn't willing to consult a man page. The SGI tools I have dealt with have worked, or I have filed bug reports, and gotten patches or acceptable workarounds back within a few weeks at most. Try that with Sun. I did. Took them 6 months to decide what to do, and another 3 to deliver a fix.
I support Linux, SGI, HP, Cray, and AIX. I used to support Sun, but thank some diety that I don't have to anymore. The sooner those broken pieces of shit (Sun) are made to go away, the better. Someone at SGI showed me (by logging in to some machine in Mountain View) their views on linux. Since linux is far superior to Solarcrap, and it runs on this hardware I am hoping to point this out to the other sysadmins around the company to let them know that they need to kick out the old Sun crap and install the nice new lower cost PCs.
Luckily, most of the Sun bigots have left, so this should not be too hard! Linux on one of these things is the best reason not to buy a Sun.
Having talked to SGI several times over the last
few months (I saw the visual PC at IBC) I was one
of the first to mention Linux as an alternative
to the NT system they were proposing.
At the time they were quite cold to the idea, but
as time went by, they got progressively more happy
about running Linux on the system....
There are problems... There are BIOS issues, the
support of the integrated chipset for X etc., the
gcc version for a UMA architecture on a PC etc.
All of this will come in time, but I think SGI will realise it's future lies in helping this
community deal with Microsoft - there's more than one way rto skin a cat
Simon.
You mean the NDA they wanted everyone to sign so that they'd feel "special" about attending a marketing meeting. That NDA??? Heh...
Have you benchmarked an Octane vs. PC lately. I've seen $6K PCs that'll make your $40K Octane cry. SGI's hardware ain't close to what it used to be. The only reason those companies choose SGI is because of the software available for them. And this is only a holdover from SGI's glory dayz. Even SGI's Alias|Wavefront division has ported Maya to NT.
SGI has lost the workstation market. Their supercomputers and $100K+ visualization systems are still top of the line. But that's not the market we are discussing here.
Look, if you want "brute force FP intensive computation" you need a better processor than the MIPS. Try the Alpha or PA-RISC or UltraSparc. If you want to compare Octane vs. PC for 3D graphics (which is what this whole thread is about) you want a PC. MIPS is such a dead-end. And slow. (Yes, by today's standards, slow.)
And where did you get the 4-5x faster bit? Maybe for rather small values of 4 or 5 this holds true. But the latest SpecFP tells a different story. SpecFP95 for a PII-450 is 12.9, a R10K-250 is 24.9. This does not equal 4-5x in my book. And I can buy dual PIIs for quite a bit less than a single R10K-250 system.
If you want raw performance, a Alpha box running Linux is what you want. 21264 is twice as fast as anything MIPS has. 21164 (commodity HW) is faster than an R10K-250. Dollar for dollar, your money is better spent on commodity PC hardware, be it Intel or Alpha.
So, exactly how well do you know Jack?
So you can compare spec numbers all day long if you want, but like penis length, they really don't measure anything of value. They are marketing numbers designed to fool the masses. Congratulations, you are part of the masses they have fooled.
:-)
Hmm... that sounded just like all of the other well-prepared SGI propaganda I've read. Problem is, those Spec numbers do mean something, as do the 3D benchmarks. No one beats SGI's top numbers. But most can't afford SGI's top products. SGI had no problem swinging their big Spec and 3D benchmark numbers around when they were king of the hill. We all know what benchmarks do and don't tell us.
You want real world benchmarks? Check Digital Video Magazine's Aug 98 benchmarks. The Octane's performance was so embarrassing they kept it in a seperate section. $60K for the SGI and it underperforms an $8K PC? Don't let the boss see that one!
I've used SGI workstations for 5 years. I've had no problem justifying 10x the price for one of those machines -- up until last year. You just couldn't do the same work on a PC as you could an SGI. But in the last two years the commodity 3D hardware and the microprocessors kept inching closer to workstations speeds.
We are now at the point that commodity hardware exceeds SGI workstations in processor and graphics performance. There are negligible differences caused by SGI's internal design. High bandwidth chipsets sound cool, but they are needed in UMA designs. They do not make up for the other deficiencies.
BTW, what is your position at SGI? You do work for them, don't you? I can tell SGI-speak when I here it. You guys do make nice machines. Your Unix workstations aren't worth what you ask anymore.
Charles de Gaule wrote:
if "administrate" is a verb, i'm charles de gaulle.
For the curious: The Merriam Webster Definition of Administrate (verb)
----
Open mind, insert foot.
If SGI is smart, they've got an army of hackers making sure these 'tweaks' are ready as soon after this bugger is announced.
IMHO, The move to an x86/NT scheme already showed that they aren't too bright. I'm part of a minority who happened to like their mips-based machines...
----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -
----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -
Your honor is perfectly understandishable.
I'm sorry, but that just conjures up weird images of geek confessions at church:
.25mm dot pitch screen.
Geek: Father, I have had impure thoughts about a Silicon Graphics workstation.
Father: Did it have 256 Meg of RAM and 15 Gig of hard drive space?
Geek: Yes, father. And a 21"
Father: Oh, my. For your penance you shall sing the Free Software Song 3 times and smash 10 AOL CD's on your forehead.
Geek: Thank you father.
Nope, no reason for Linux whatsoever. Don't need stability after all: we're not talking about serious work here (just movies, simulations, and other nonsense). After all, per-seat licenses won't be anything, really.
We all know how fast NT is, so there's another reason that Linux would be of no value here. Why bother? Portability isn't an issue either, we all know the world runs on Intel.
Guess it's time to pay homage to the Empire.</sarcasm>
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I agree here.
From the looks of this thing's designe, there is NO WAY IN HELL that video card manufacturers will ever be able to clone this thing, because the video subsystem is highly integrated into the rest of the machine. Essentially, to clone this, you would have to re-engineer an entire machine from the ground up, just like SGI did.
I wish I had the cash for one of these... They look simply *amazing*, although it would be even cooler if they happened to have a decent processor at their heart.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Your not alone. I loved the SGI hardware. I wish I had one, they are the only thing thatI mihgt be able to convince mom to keep in the living room. Why are all cases puddy or black? It doesn't cast anything significant to sell a bunch of colors. Apple hasn't really got this point either the iMac is a step, but just a tiny one.
The electronics are nice too. I loved playing with openGL on a 100 mhz machine. And it was fast enough for the complex graphics I was doing. Well, slow by todays sgi standards, but fast compared to what a pc can do today.
if the accelerated graphics hardware will be
supported? the video stuff would be nice too...
Perhaps *you* can get your work done on leetle PCs running MesaGL and Linux, but I need to get real work done, and this is one SGI user who won't be buying standard PCs to run his applications on.
If MesaGL, Linux, and a standard PC were up to the task, why would Lucasfilm, PIXAR, Rhythm & Hues, PDI, Digital Domain, Disney, ILM &c, &c, &c, use SGIs in the first place?
The question's rhetorical, but I'll answer it anyway: because no PC provides adequate performance, and so long as SGI exists, ever will.
A $12,000 Octane WILL be incalcuably superior to a $1299 Dell or Compaq. And quite honestly, if you'd rather not prefer an Octane for the work you're doing, you really *don't* know what you're doing.
(Good enough is one thing, but who in their right mind would actually rather have a PC instead of an Octane?)
Ever seen ESPN.com on a linux box? Most web designers don't even bother checking their pages on anything more than plain Windows.
I do fault X quite a bit tho. When I look at stuff on my OS/2 version of netscape, it tends to at least have the same relative sizes as windows, while X fails at this miserably.
After a further review of their HTML source, there are some pretty good reasons for the crummy text. :)
1) They use the small tag all over for no apparent reason. I'm not even sure what this supposed to do, but apparently X takes it literally.
2) They use a style sheet to force the text size to be 12 pt in the body. At high rez, 12 pt seems pretty tiny.
SGI is not "just another kewl box maker" or do they give a shit about "kewl warez."
SGI makes real boxes for real use. Use a PC to make your warez copies.
As for most everything else, IRIX runs just great. It scales well and is for the most part pretty standard.
SGI not being smart in moving to NT? Are you serious? They hope to cash in on the low-end where people are using NT-based 3D software. People with a clue and some cash will still use an Octane/Onyx system with Maya. I for one wouldn't buy this box and run NT if I could avoid it - I'd go straight to an Octane. However not every company/person can afford this and must resort to using NT. I fall into this category too - until 3D Studio Max is ported to something other than NT, I'm stuck - but this would be THE machine to use for it.
SGI isn't dumb. They're covering the full spectrum, that's all.
An VPC won't touch an Octane. No way. Not as long as the VPC runs NT.
The new PowerMac G3s start at $1599. SGI starts at twice that with an identical configuration. (OK. No SCSI card...easily remedied for under $300.)
SoupIsGood Food
No this thing is A high end workstation, the iMac is a low end intro box, Its sort of the differnce between a $10,000 Ford and a $50,000 Sports Car. Different spec for a different job.
(But it does look cool)
--Zachary Kessin
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Is it just me, or does that page have some of the tinyest, hardest to read text I have seen in any web page at all lately. I may have to reconfigure X completely to set things to a lower resolution in order to read this vaguly worded artical well enough to even understand what OS these things are running? I think I saw "NT" in there, but maybe it was "MT?" or "VT?" I also think I saw IRIX in there, but I couldn't make out if it was just an IRIX style boot screen for an NT box or what...
Maybe it's just to early in the morning for me or something, or a bad day... I need a magnifying glass for this thing.... Oh, wait, "View Page Source!" yea, that Will show it at a standard size that hopefully I can read... What a sad way to have to read something.
I had to go back and re read that artical over, and from all indications i saw, it was NT only. If this box _IS_ NT only, you can bet your bottom dollar someone will be porting LINUX to it fast.
No, if they actually had IRIX for it on the other hand, that wouldn't be the case.
ps. I am still frusturated to hell with the tiny print in that artical, I had to set the font selection in Netscape through the roof (like 18 point) to read it, now /. looks like something for kindergarders that I should break out some crayons to color by comparison.
Don't tell me you forgot about xmag?!
----
----Daniel Pearson of the UMBC LUG
According to an interview that Linux Today is covering, SGI's aware of a desire to see Linux running on their to be released hot hardware (Seems like at every turn they're asked if it'll support Linux- from potential end-users and the pundits.) and they're going to formulate their answer with regards to Linux shortly.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
IMHO, The move to an x86/NT scheme already showed that they aren't too bright. I'm part of a minority who happened to like their mips-based machines...
I can't tell you how many times I've pulled my hair out because if inconsistencies between SGI NFS implementations and the rest of the world. Even IRIX 6.x has problems exporting NFS v.3 to Solaris 2.6... and this is *after* dealing with its horrible 64bit NFS bugs (-32bitclients anyone?). Sure, IRIX scales wonderfully as an SMP kernel, but the userspace tools and many basic UNIX services have been broken for too long. Solaris is just as good a server and it *doesn't* have these problems.
Of course, suggesting that Linux can solve their IRIX problems on commodity Intel hardware only shows that you've never dealth with a serious server. When MIPS Linux or UltraLinux supports 64 CPUs with good threading and apps to make use of this then it may compete with IRIX and Solaris.
As for SGI's last ditch effort with an NT desktop, I don't think this is going to generate significant revenue for SGI because their technology will simply be cloned by the major video card makers within 6 months to a year after release. They don't stand a chance.
The MIPS hardware line is *excellent*... Irix needs some tweeks to make it useful in heterogeneous environments and SGI should fix these obnoxious problems instead of pointing fingers at Sun (and Sun should do the same!) SGI seems destined to throw away their best technology for a forray into the commodity PC world. Good Luck. They'll need it.
Well, wouldn't SGI be the ones to talk about :-)
:).
in this respect? I think that they'd have
more expertise in this area
But seriously, I could see SGI selling these
beasts as Linux workstations. NT for the ones
who want something new & shiny on their desks,
and Linux for those who actually want to get
work done (and play Quake REALLY REALLY FAST
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
SGI could care less about linux. This machine is targeted at folks who want to run packages like SoftImage and Maya, which run under NT. This box will do just fine without linux support.
I guess I should explain the point I was trying to make in my previous comment. What I mean is this:
The way that SGI should market this box is as an NT-based graphics box, basically designed to run SoftImage and Maya and run them really really fast. High-end 3D stuff basically.
NT boxes seem to be taking over the 3D design market. The reason is simple: price. You can put together an NT box with a very decent 3D graphics adapter for a fraction of what you can put together an equivalent SGI or Sun box for. SGI needs to capture this market. There is NO point in trying to build this box to run linux. If you want a good linux box (or FreeBSD if you're like me), there are a million zillion other choices out there. Specialize, specialize, specialize.
> I cant help but wonder who has a chance to
:)
> compete against SGI in the high end workstation
> market with one of these babies.....
The funny thing is that they are not high end workstations. They're intended to be low-end workstations, not as competition for their Octanes. It's just that some high-end workstations will have trouble keeping up.
that's why lynx makes life easier
SGI started development on this box a couple of
years ago, and I'm not too surprised that they
chose NT as the operating system. At the time,
that was the gutsy thing, and perhaps the right
thing to do; I'm not terribly surprised that Linux
wasn't considered.
The question is "what is SGI's idea of the market
for this box?" If it is to replace their O2
machine (which I'm using to type this mail), then
they're going to have to have some kind of UNIX
for it. As I understand it, SGI plans to kill
the O2 line very quickly when this box comes out,
and then the cheapest UNIX box from SGI will be
an $12,000 or so Octane. So, perhaps they are
hoping that when people need new UNIX workstations
they'll buy Octanes.
My guess is that this was the plan 2 years ago,
when development was started. Clearly, though,
Linux has changed all that.
What makes an SGI box worth the money that I've
paid for them? A lot of things. It's got a
nice Unix, it has a spectacularly simple and
straightforward graphics library for development,
it has high bandwidth in every dimension, and
they've been reliable. Part of the appeal, also,
is that they covet, and respect, the animation/
visual-effects market.
But, if I had to buy machines now, I'd buy Linux
machines and run Mesa, and tolerate the slow
(for now) graphics performance, rather than buy
$5,000 NT boxes or $12,000 Octanes. I think that
a lot of other current SGI owners will do the same
thing.
If this Visual Workstation machine ran Linux,
it would be a spectacular machine; and I'd buy
10 of them tomorrow. The beauty of Linux with
the graphics speed of the SGI chipset would
be killer.
So, I'm hoping that SGI will see the light, and
will not be afraid of the penguins.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
finally...
someone realizes that Apple does not have a monopoly on sleek-ass box hooked up to sleek-ass hardware...
-Lupus
Aren't you dead?
Lynx is a wonderful thing! ;-)
Market
Nothing wrong with those objectives, actually sounds like a good idea when you put it that way.
As for huge bashes... it is a great machine, and
considering SGI's design and product introduction cycles, they are due for a big change sometime very soon. The VisualPC is the (hopefully) little splash.
All I can hope for is a port of linux or even IRIX to one of these machines... And if SGI were to do a port of linux, maybe we'd have full opengl? And broader hardware support of opengl? *gasp* *breath* (:
I always told myself I'd use all linux if I could find the killer 3d app that I like... Looks like blender might be that app. It's blazingly fast without a 3d card on a p200, would love to see it on one of these bad boys with hardware accelleration... *drool*
I don't think SGI is unsmart to go to the NT market, they are a corporation and if the market changes, they have to change with it. NT has seen a recent rise in the number of high-end 3d applications being ported to it, even if they run pretty poorly on said operating system. SGI and TDZ are the only two companies I know of offhand that are after the high-end 3d graphics NT (can I use high-end and NT in one sentence? Will the universe rip itself apart?) market, and I'd like to admit I'm curious how well the programs will run under NT on these...
I hope to die peacefully in my sleep like grandpa, not screaming like his passengers.