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New SGI Intel Boxes Officially Released
David S. Miller was the first
to write in to say that SGI has updated their web pages to
announce the release of their new
Visual Workstations.
The page proudly proclaims "For Windows NT". The rumors are
flying that these things will soon officially support Linux,
so Cross your fingers and wait. Wonderful hardware. Seems like a
shame to cripple it.
So maybe David could enlighten us as to why
www.linux.sgi.com seems to have disappeared?
...buy one!
Sure SGI will officially support Linux. Just as soon as Microsoft lets them. They've gone to bed with the devil and now they're in the same boat as Compaq, Dell, Gateway and all the other PC vendors, except that SGI is targeting a niche PC market of graphics artists. And don't give me any "but this isn't just an ordinary PC, it's got all kinds of cool SGI stuff in it." Yeah, cool hardware that's specifically optimized for NT. SGI stopped being proactive and resorted to being reactive about 18-24 months ago. They're just one of the herd now.
considering how the prez of SGI spoke at MacWorld I thought I'd use both company's online stores to do a quick price check. remember, both machines would make smokin Linux boxes....
low-end comparison:
**SGI Visual Workstation 320**
Pentium II 450 w/512k cache
128mb RAM
14.4gb Ultra ATA drive
Zip drive
no CDRom, audio, or ethernet
$4454
**PowerMac G3**
PowerPC G3 400mhz w/1mb backside cache
128mb RAM
12gb Ultra ATA drive
Zip drive
32x CD ROM
16 bit stereo audio in/out
100 base-T ethernet
$2759
higher end comparison:
**SGI Visual Workstation 320**
Pentium II 450 w/512k cache
1024mb RAM
two 9gb Ultra2 SCSI drives
Zip drive
SGI 21" CRT
no DVD, ethernet
$10,861
**Apple PowerMac G3**
PowerPC 400 w/1mb backside cache
1024mb RAM
two 9gb Ultra2 SCSI drives w/RAID controller
Zip drive
Apple 21" Studio Display
DVD-RAM drive
Gigabit ethernet
$10,628
So it looks like at all but the high high end (SGI can add high end video and audio cards that you'd have to get 3rd party on the Mac and can run dual Pentiums that could beat the single PowerPC chip) the Mac has the SGI beat in cost/performance ratio.
And even on the higher end comparison - take away the DVD-RAM and the gigabit ethernet and the mac price drops another $1500.
Go do the comparison yourselves - the numbers don't lie. Those new G3's also have FireWire and USB ports built in and that nifty side door for on the fly hardware changes, 3 66mhz PCI slots, and a very nice video card.
SGI hates NT. That's pretty clear, seeing as they are used to making high-end workstations. So, why release NT boxes? 'Cuz Intergraph is eating up SGI's market with their hardware (for NT). SGI realizes that people will still spend megabucks on support even for low-end shit like NT graphics software.
-AC
I ran through their "custom configurator" thing and came up with a $6700 pricetag for a dual Pentium-II 450Mhz 256MB RAM configuration. For $6700, I could buy two generic brand dual P-II motherboards and build two clone workstations that might not have the I/O bandwidth, but would have twice the horsepower and not only would run NT just fine, but would be assured of working with Linux too...
Everyone please realize, NT is shit, but is NOT crippling SGI boxes, compared to Linux, because Linux CAN'T do professional color management.
So get off your absurd link between "graphics" and "Linux." Yeah, The Gimp rules, etc. But NOT in the real world, as it exists today.
Don't waste time blasting me or this (correct) comment. Devote same energy toward improving the Linux position, so your current thoughts are correct.
To correct your FUD, 320 comes with CDROM, audio, video, Ethernet, FireWire and USB as standard. In addition (if this doesn't cover your needs), you can buy a very sophisticated digital audio card, video compression, scsi- and fibre-channel adapters. (3 PCI-slots, and sufficient bw to handle it.)
And the NT-drivers got hw-accel for OpenGL and D3D.
You are comparing this to a MAC???
And this AC happens to know some details about Linux on Hugh....
Apple's cache has a max speed of 200MHz whereas the SGI has a max speed of 450MHz. The apple supports up to one processor, the SGI supports four. The Apple doesn't perform as well on floating point as the Intel. This doesn't even touch the fact that nobody should even consider buying one of these unless they really need the Cobalt chipset, which funny your Mac doesn't compete with.
Don't get me wrong I think these boxes are a really bad deal unless you really need the rendering engine, and most people who do would be better suited with a bigger system anyway. But, there is pretty much no circumstance I can think of where a Mac provides the most bang for the buck.
These boxes are not quite your average NT machine. It looks as if standard PCI peripherals and NT drivers might not work with it. Own BIOS & HAL, according to ARS Technica article.
... a closed NT box. It cetainly looks like a traditional specialist UNIX box, only running NT.
Quite an interesting concept then
It will be interesting to see if these things sell, becuase Operations, Administration & Maintenance might prove to be worse than stock NT. And the economies of PC devices might not apply.
Hmmm... so will this save SGI ? Probably not.
We take in files from Macs, from Windows boxes, and from Linux users. We can use them all, but only the Mac ones are near adequate to start with. The remainder ... I'd swear nobody has ever heard of calibration.
But not really that much more than a Dell 410 with
a good graphics card
SGI 320 Dell 410
CPU 2x450Mhz 2x450Mhz
Memory 256MB 256MB
Graphics Cobalt GMX2000
Disk 10GB ATA 10GB IDE
Monitor 21" 21"
NIC included 3COM 3C900
CDROM 32x 32x
Speakers Polk Altec Lansing
Keyboard SGI Performance
3Btn Mouse SGI Logitech
$7123 $6836
I left the default service agreements, it looks
like bring them to the same level adds more to the
SGI price, but service agreements are hard to
compare.
I'm no expert on color systems, but one of the features of the 1600SW flat panel is its color synchronization software. In fact, you can get a Number Nine video card for the 1600SW for your standard PC in addition to support on the O2 and VW. This may be a selling point for publishers to buy 1600SWs.
I'm not sure what the name of the software is, but they tout being able to guarantee what you see on the screen is what you get. I'm not sure if this is exclusive of ColorSync or beyond it.
"professional color management" is an _application_ issue, not an O/S issue. If Adobe ported Photoshop to Linux, it would presumably have the same color management capabilities as any other port.
Also, color management of the sort the Gimp does not currently have, due to patent problems, is only an issue for print media. SGI is targeting these boxes towards the 3D/video/fx markets, where such considerations are irrelevant.
It's pretty arrogant to post technically ignorant comments and then tell people ahead of time not to say anything about your "correct" comments.
- Maciej Stachowiak
You couldn't be more wrong. You obviously don't have a clue as to what is actually in these boxes. Do the words Lithium or Cobalt mean anything to you?
you're going to compare an ATI 3D graphics card to an SGI graphics system with 3.6Gb/s throughput? Jeesh. Get out.
One of the problems NT has faced in taking more market share from the MAC is that it doesn't have built-in support for color mgt. The MAC does. I'm not awre of any other volume OSes that do. Maybe BeOS does but it's niche (right now) and I'm sure the high-end stuff like IRIX would too but the only volume OS that I know of is MAC.
http://www-europe.sgi.com/developers/technology/#c olorlock
You have the source code. If it's so easy then
do it yourself. Otherwise I wouldn't comment
on the ability of the Gimp's coders.
um...intergraph also targets professionals and their workstations are even better than these new sgi's.
If you can't do Pantone it will be useless for print media anyway, and what the Gimp does now is adequate for web graphics and the like.
The fact remains however, that this is an app and not an OS issue.
Either way, I don't think it is fair to say the Gimp developers don't know what they are doing. They are generally volunteers with limited time and have done some very impressive work considering.
If there was an Alpha 21264 in them, I would buy immediately, even if I don't have the money ;-)
Nuff said.
These boxes suck because: 1) You have to run NT at least for now, 2) They're Intel-based
Why waste your time with the cripple that is Linux? Install BeOS and enjoy.
Dude, you are so full of shit. The new low-end box does come with a CD-ROm, and better a/v than
the Mac. It's the only machine of it's pricerange
right now that will run Premiere out of the box
and let you do full FPS video editing...
These boxes have USB keyboards. Linux doesn't speak USB.
sorry.
Don't forget that the video card is on it's wn 66mhz bus making it's video subsystem faster than AGP 4x because all the agp speed is used to acess the main memory bus
One word in specs about 20integer PII 450 on real tests not intel biased scores a 12 now you tell me how accurate this is. FP is slightly faster but the G4 are supposed to be 50% faster than PII in FP and 100% in Integer, lets not forget that IBM has the worlds fastest computer that runs on superfast 604e processors. Beat Gary Karospov very fast.
Of course they have to back Windows NT if they
want to remain in business. The average computer
professional today is too stupid to handle a
command line.
Personally, I like their older Power Series,
and Personal IRIS machines better. The Indigo
(4d/35) was a great machine (and still is).
The indy / indio^2 are both nice machines as well.
And well, all my friends still shut the hell up about their 3dfx boards when I fire up the Crimson R4000 100mhz machine with the Reality Engine board set. And figure that machine is from what year? 1992?
SGI's machines are quality.
IRIX is great for 64 bit apps and multiprocessor environments as well. (Who cares about security,
I'm talking for desktop and back end apps).
Although I would love to see FreeBSD ported to run on Mips R3k / R4k hardware. Throw in support for hardware texturemapping (VGX, VGXT, Skywriter, Reality Engine, etc) and the high performance polygon boards (XY XZ ELAN stuff).
SMP for 4d/2x0's and 4x0's.... Woohoo. That would
be cooking with gas.
If linux comes out for SGI, skip it. Wait for the BSD. OpenBSD is currently being ported for the SGI MIPS platform. Don't know about graphics.
Oh, and don't forget to check www.top500.org just
to remind yourself WHO IS KING. SGI IS KING.
More machines than anyone. Eat it SUN.
(the intel thing that holds the #1 position is crap. 9000 Pentium Pros or some crap. Funq that
noise!).
Questions for anyone familiar with SGI/Irix:
Realistically, could SGI port Irix to Intel chips?
Could they maybe port 4Dwm, Indigo Magic Desktop (do they still have that?), the GUI sysadmin tools (which I've heard are good), the multimedia stuff, and all the 3D stuff to Linux or a BSD to get an Irix-like Unix environment running on one of those Intel boxes?
--ccg, who is ignorant of all things Irix but will never buy an SGI to run NT.
the 17 inch flat monitor is 2.5k! I think i'd rather buy another machine with that money...
----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -
----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -
Your honor is perfectly understandishable.
Where did you get those numbers?
... bahhahahahaha try 5x that)
When I looked 3 hours ago, the 320 included 32x CDROM drive, A/V, and 10/100 Ethernet. Oh and did you check out the 6x AGP(next gen even) speed
of the gfx pipeline?
I'll grant you I prefer the G3 over any pentium
but don't dish UMA cos it can dish ya.
(66mhz PCI slots
www.linux.sgi is down.
sgi seems really silent on li.org
the FAQ on the site does not mention linux
a search for linux on that site brings up nothing
(this is a search on the new products site)
some say something about MS not liking sgi
dealing with linux, and shutting all that down.
maybe thy were right. SGI now bows to microsoft?
selling NT boxen is one thing, but having started
stuff with linux and so suddenly and silently
dropping it like this makes them seem to be
bowing to microsoft. and losing my respect for them.
ill ask at the "launch event"
IMHO, they already crippled the machine by putting an Intel processor in it, instead of a descent one. (Anything! MIPS R 10000, G3, Ultrasparc, Alpha).
One of the herd? Sure. But at least they're out in front.
SGI is dead!
MIPS is gone!
Merced will run Crays!
Hehehe.
I don't see them porting Irix to Intel though. Why would/should they? They're "real" boxes aren't going anywwhere...
I suppose everything else SGI does means nothing and will just disappear now, right? Sure. Uh huh. Okay... :)
SGI is still SGI. Just because they release an NT box doesn't mean jack shit. They're cashing in on the burgeoning NT graphical workstation market. It's their job, as visual workstation leader to provide workstations - so why not catch a little of the Wintel crowd?
Did you forget about the SGI's waaaaay better bus? Video sub-system? Internal bandwidth?
If he was using NT, I'd say it surely would be a "big bang" theory... Heh. It would be off by 2.26 million years (Pentium bug). :)
It's a toss-up. As much as I love SGI systems for visual/graphical work, I think I'd still go with a Sun for a Web server - although the Origin and Challenge systems are really nice as such as well.
Just good to know that SGI can't be /.'ed. :)
Pantone is indeed patented. However, it's a method to name/describe a color in a standardized fashion and doesn't really have anything whatsoever to do with color management.
As for color correction and management, I have news for you. It has to do with a LOT more than just printed media. The "red" you scan should be the "red" you see on-screen which should print out as "red" on that printer or to video tape or to CD...
What a completely assanine thing to say! Granted, the GIMP does not have all the features that say, Photoshop has, like Pantone, RGB, LAB and CYMK color models. First off, many of those are pantented. Secondly, the GIMP is still new. How long has Photoshop been around? I'm sure in time the GIMP will add other models.
To say that they don't know what they're doing is not right. It may be true for all I know about GIMP internals, but hey...
I haven't seen your name in the GIMP credits nor do I see you writing anything similar!
I for one applaud and THANK the GIMP folks. If it weren't for them, I'd still be bitching that I have to run Windoze to do graphics.
So please, keep really lame comments like this to yourself.
I disagree.
/dev/colormanagement device in Linux. Not even a /proc/color/management.
Sure, there is no
However, NT has a way of frequently turning all your graphics into a solid shade of blue, so its color management is arguably far worse.
I was just at the NT rollout here in NYC and I asked the Linux question.
According to the SGI people there:
There will be no SGI supported version of Linux anytime in the near future. If there is to be one someone's got to hack one together.
It's not as simple as it might seem as there is no BIOS on these machines as they boot from ROM. There may also be problems fully optimizing Linux for the machines as they have this unified memory structure. There will also be other issues that come up as SGI Linux is developed.
Little or no software developed by SGI solely for IRIX has been ported to run on this machine. They have ported some of the Open Inventor libaries but not the applications as of yet.
Realistically, could SGI port Irix to Intel chips? Rumor is that they already have. When it was inquired as to the availability we were told that it was not an option at this time. Could they maybe port 4Dwm, Indigo Magic Desktop (do they still have that?), the GUI sysadmin tools (which I've heard are good), the multimedia stuff, and all the 3D stuff to Linux or a BSD to get an Irix-like Unix environment running on one of those Intel boxes? That could be done. Doing that would put thier widget sets there too, and then things like Maya are just a skip away. -danimal
Hmm, Let me think a minute. PII 450, Quality motherboard, 256M 7ns SDRAM, 12-18M video card...
Nope, a rock solid kick butt box just doesn't seem to top $3,000 the when I add it up. And, with personal experiance telling me that SGI's support is less than pleasing, strike two.
Now, they MAY(?) support Linux? Well, IMHO, they would be better off supporting IRIX on it, because that is the only way we would buy one around here. The only reason I can see for gettting this beast is price compared to other SGI's, and the fact that our department relys on some commercial software that the vendors will only port to IRIX (we have begged for years for something else). But, no IRIX? Strike three.
If I wanted a hot PII Linux box, I think I would consider building one. This SGI looks like it has some Killer I/O bandwidth, and a very interesting chipset... but, when the smut hit's the fan, it's still the same CPU's...
Don't get me wrong, it looks like it's a great box. But be fully aware, it's for a specific nitch, and it's not for everyone. I would probably say, IMHO, most people would be better servered with something else, considering some of the great stuff you could get in this price range. But if your one of those people who are in the nitch, be happy, now it's filled.... But I know, this thing just isn't for me.
Do they mean it looks cool? Obviously with that monitor, it's not because it will be stunning graphics. IF anyone out there get's one of these things, do yourself a favor, and consider getting a real monitor for it.
Thanks for making all Mac users look like uninformed, quasi-religiously blinded, idiots. While the new G3 series makes a good Photoshop workstation, and will likely be my next, good GOD, please get a clue. And have you ever even run Linux on a PowerMac?
But the new Apple boxes are butt-ugly and if I had to choose a sucky, lousy OS I'd take NT over MacOS anyday - I'd rather have neither. Make a linux comparison ad the SGI still wins due to the fac that LinuxPPC and MkLinus aren't up to speed with the x86 version.
Well put.
Ultrasparc? Talk about crippling. Those are so sluggish and really, really expensive.
If you are the same person posting this "professional color management" rant over and over, you ought to try chilling out. Go outside and look at the sky or something...
Linux is missing a lot of stuff but "professional color management", that one you keep saying, is so far down the list as to be invisible.
I work in special effects at Digital Domain (using SGI, NT, and Linux) and I can confirm we don't give a shit about "professional color management" or CMYK or Pantone colors or any of the other things that are "missing from Gimp". In fact Gimp does everything we need in a painting program (we use Amazon Paint instead, as it is nicer, but Amazon has no more "color management" than Gimp).
Anybody who believes it is physically possible to match colors emitted from a phospher with colors caused by reflecting light off a silvered screen with colors produced by reflecting light twice through a dye and off a piece of paper should perhaps study physics a bit more.
We do exactly what everybody should do: print an output on the final medium and look at it and decide if the color is wrong. "Relative color management" (ie saying "it's too dark, make it lighter, even though it looks ok on the screen") works perfectly even on the cheapest hardware and software.
My comments in January '99 issue of Samovar awards:
d ex.html
http://www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu/~andrew/awards/in
Andrew
True...
I'd say its not so much a 64bit/32bit issue as a big/little endian issue. Intels 32bit processors are all little endian, MIPS and IA64 are bi-endian....
There seems little ROI to port Irix to a 32bit little endian machine.
Its the apps...
Yes, these boxes have high-end Compaq or high-end
IBM prices at the start, which isn't too bad.
But the upgrade prices are *SGI* upgrade prices,
and those are indecently high - just look at what's suggested for memory, CPU or hard disc upgrades.
I realise I can't get a UMA box with P2s in it anywhere else at the moment, but I'd like to know how much I could upgrade the machine with commodity parts.
Quad Xeon systems are pretty competitive with anything out there. Intel are *not* bad at processor design.
My evidence - I ran a big distributed task across 25 systems ranging from a 486DX2/66 to an Alpha 533 and an Ultrasparc 267. The P2/350 systems beat both the Alpha and the Ultrasparc, the P2/400 systems beat them resoundingly, and the dual P2/400 was quite amusing.
Tom
It is nice to see some governments gracefully admit their mistakes and move on, in contrast to others which pass ever more draconian legistlation in an effort to tame the free thought that is expressed on-line. Hopefully we'll be seeing more stories like this one in the months ahead (well, one can always dream).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Good, not great. It's not as good as some of SGI's other boxes (Onyx2 and Octane coem to mind). At least they did that right.
Are you sure about that? I was under the impression the G3 had the edge on the P2 in integer by a lot but that they were closer in fp. Granted I haven't looked at any recent SPEC scores so I might be wrong, but I thought that was the case.
Don't forget on itel you get FP or MMX, but not both without a large performance penalty.
It will be interesting when the next generation PPC "G4" processors come out. Matrix math and FP without the performance penalty.
I think the SGI's are great. Just like apple, they are a break with the old, no ISA, firewire, usb. But, just like MS, they ship late.
No matter how often you repeat the Unix canard about some missing feature of the OS being an "application issue," you won't make it true.
Color management is a hardware issue, and only the OS should be directly manipulating the hardware. In addition, color management is crucial for any serious graphics -- to say that it's only relevant for print media is the height of, shall we say, "technical ignorance."
The GIMP is a pretty amazing program, not so much for what it does, but rather for how sophisticated it is, given the overwhelming weaknesses of the underlying platform. X sucks.
Regards,
JFB
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Yeah, Enjoy the lack of hardware supported currently. Yeah, BeOS is cool, i'm a developer, but, unless you're gonna do alot of media stuff, and only use hardware they _currently_ support, you're SOL.
That misses the point, though. The whole reason
for the SGIs is 3D performance, and at that they
rock. The 3D graphics performance is significantly
better than the HP Kayak boards. The only thing
that really beats it is the Intergraph Wildcats,
and they cost more. Since main memory can be
used as texture map memory with little or no
performance hit, you can do riduculous things
like use a gigabyte of memory for texture maps.
Try and do that with an 8 MB graphics card. So SGI is selling very high
performance 3D at a decent price.
If you don't want to do 3D, these are not machines
for you. If you need very high graphics performance and are willing to pay a manageable
premium for it, these are good machines.
Yesterday one of those fancy SGI demo trucks
was parked at the Caltech campus for a few hours.
When I asked a SGI rep if they were going to
support Linux in any way he replied that they
are writing the graphics driver for these new
machines and that in a few months they should be
ready and SGI will officially support Linux...