Slashdot Mirror
Hands-on Review of the SGI Visual Workstations
An anonymous reader sent us a good review of those
SGI Visual Workstations that we all want to reformat and
stick Linux on. The review is that its a solid, and even
superior NT machine. Wonder what sort of Linux box it'll
make. I volunteer to test it! (Along with I bet just about
anyone else who reads this page)
The abscence of price comparisons that are usually plastered all over the hardware pages I frequent tells you something about who these workstations' target buyers are.
Considering the bacnhmark run between NT and Linux for Apace web servers This computer could really rock!
I went down to our local SGI office and played with one on launch day. They are indeed very cool. The Wow! demo especially rocked.
The reflection mapping in it is awesome. Having seen it, I really have to laugh at the idiots who think that it's a stock Wintel machine and that they are going to get the same sort of performance out of their cheesy little PC with dual Voodoo2's.
Now that SGI has made their Linux announcement, I'm going to see about getting them to demo one at an upcoming LUG meeting.
http://www.slashdot.org/art icles/99/01/05/0959234.shtml
for anyone who's interested, you can order SGI VPC's cheaply here.
It'll go right here, next to the O2, VArServer 4100d, and Octane. The T3E-1200 can go over there, the CM-5 can go in the hall, and the Origin 2000 can go over in the living room, next to the Tera, ASCI Red, and the Paragon!
For "the low end box ... just below $4,000", SGI is once again trying to sell^H^H^H^Hpander overpriced, underpowered equiptment by cramming it into a "sleek-n-slick" shiny plastic box.
Right now you can pick up a VArStation YMP(dual 450) with a 16mb Matrox G200 for under $3800 which will easily bury SGI's VPC320(UP) offering. VA's YMP(dual 350) at "just below" $2800 also outdoes this monster.
What it comes down to is, you'd be hard pressed to find someone trying to charge more while offering less.
Their LCD screen, on the other hand, is the coolest thing I've ever seen.
/* MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
MADMEN ONLY */
I work for an SGI and Intergraph reseller, and due to that many of us in the office recieved personal invitations to SGI's Visual Workstation release party a few weeks ago. I must say that these machines are DAMN fast. I managed to play on one after the presentation and breakfast they gave us. Talk about doing real time rendering in Maya while editing the textures, facial expressions on models, adding sound.. all at the same time on a single P2 450 at 1600x1200. The Cobalt graphics on these things are incredible (Just interested in seeing how Intergraph's Wildcat 4100 compares to it). Anyone who says that these machines are the same speed as a dual voodoo2 machine have it all wrong, (like someone mentioned earlier). These things surpass that in performance by miles and miles. Being that the graphics bus on these things are 6x's faster than AGP 2X and other majorly different things that seperate these machines from regular PC's. They boot differently.. (not a bios type anymore).. they just take advantage of everything like regular pc's don't. The thing that made me laugh though, (as much as I love linux), is that everyone is complaining about Linux support on it and running Linux on it. I'm sorry but you all are complete idiots if you go for it.. if you just buy these machines to run Linux on it. These boxes were VERY impressive.. especially for an NT machine. You don't go off paying $4,200 (without monitor (flatpanel is almost $2,000)), just for a machine like this to run Linux on it. What kind of programs would u run in linux that would take advantage of the graphics on this? the video? hell.. even the 64bit pci cards/slots? Nothing. c'mon.. lighten up, and get real.. These machines aren't meant for Linux at all... (but who knows in the future..) Just can't wait for another month before mine comes in.
Also.. these machines are not overpriced. If you compare systems that can do what these do or even come close to it. They're about the same price or more. Your average Intergraph workstation starts at around $3,800 or so (Intergraph TDZ 2000 GL2 128 megs ram, single P2 400 with RealiZm II 32 meg graphics). And actually the system I listed right there costs the same and the SGI 320's kill it.. they're actually cheap. They're not intended for average PC users that look for a $2,400 computer to bring home for the family on X-mas day.
The same people that are screaming for Linux support are also screaming for them to at least release an OpenGL shared library. Yeah, it would be binary only, but at least its a start.
:-)
Once you have that, I would bet that a whole bunch of companies that have internal CAD and visualization applications that run on Unix would buy those things. As it seems that SGI will be phasing out Irix on their workstation-class systems, I am sure that quite a few customers would be interested if it saved them the cost of porting their tools & applications.
Oh yeah, I would buy one, too
You obviously haven't read about the VPC's hardware architecture... How could a G200 on a
... they seem about the same to me.
100 mhz bus compare to the VPC's arsenic? Bwahaha.
P.S. What is the difference between "just below $4000" and "$3800"
P.P.S. How can you say anything would "easily bury" something you've never even tested, especially since you don't understand the architecture (or haven't read far enough into the article to get to that)?
-thomas
Very Funny, So, what is your opinion of the SGI workstation in question?
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
I am going to stick my neck out on this, but I would argue that pound for pound, there are more apps for Linux than NT. Granted, NT has more commercially known apps on it. However, some of the best cad and graphics programs can run under linux. There are a multitude of Ray tracing, frame editing, and other Graphics utilities that run under linux. On top of that, Linux can cluster a hell of a lot better than NT, which means you can
more easily use Linux to ray trace large numbers of frames for large production Movies. This machine will market to the CAD and hollywood industries, where linux already has a strong hold. Linux makes sense for this SGI workstation, and SGI knows it.
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
what drug are you on? this thing has an internal bus 6x faster than anything you can get from VAResearch.
1600x1200x24 Quake in n+++ FPS?
:)
Maybe this will be the minimum platform required for Quake 4..
I (am forced to) use NT at work on a AMD K6 233Mhz with 64mb, and it is TOTALLY annoying. It pauses and fits and starts CONSTANTLY. This happens if I'm typing a Word document, opening a spreadsheet or whatever. It just pauses for a second or two all the time! It drives me crazy. I would NEVER use this OS at home based on this experience.
Can anyone out there comment on their experiences with NTWS4.0SP3 (or similar)? Have you come across the same thing? What about anyone using the OS maybe at work on some high-powered Intel-based computers?
I'd be interested to hear...
Cheers,
Matthew
Let's see... do apps like
Photoshop
Premiere
After Affects
Infini-D
Strata Studio
run on i386 linux? (they run on NT and MacOS)
Please don't tell me that I can use the gimp to get my work done under linux. I'd rather use Photoshop 3 on a Mac IIci. Work would get done much faster and with much less pain.
I don't think linux makes sense for these workstations.
Considering that SGI has announced Linux support for these boxes I wonder if they would contribute code to the XFree86/Mesa multithreaded server project. Can you imagine Mesa drivers for this? RedHat should work with them on this.
Talk about your kickass Linux box. Linux users might not be breaking down the doors to buy one, but as a Show Pony it would be second to none.
Great Linux PR.
Once SGI comes out with full Linux support for those machines (including a fast X server and OpenGL), I'd consider buying one. For my NT needs, I'll stick with more standard hardware.
Wasn't an ars-tecnica review of the Visual workstations posted to /. like weeks ago?
Or is this a different one?
I agree. Anything that can give me
20 fps or better on Quake is equivalent
to me. I ain't no graphic artist, I am
a user.
hehe
You don't need him/her to give you directions. Just look for the house with the large power substation in the back yard. You will be able to hear the air conditioner from 2 miles away.
tehehehe
until then, this thing is pure hype.
__
Scott Draves
You really have no clue, don't you ? Have you heard of VPC's Cobalt chipset? Have you heard of SGI's UMA architecture ? Have you heard of VPC's 3.2GB per second memory bandwidth ? SGI VPC (even not Xeon one) beats the $6000 SGI O2 workstation hands down (which in turn beats all UNIX workstations in this price range and absolutely eveything in x86 world). Go to SGI web site and read. Plain vanilla PC will never beat VPC, even the VA research ones. By the way VA, research computers are waaay expensive. I'd rather buy a Micron or Dell wich will have the same performance at 2/3 price and install Linux on my own.
Read the VPC Linux howto. Linux just boots. Thats it. No USB keyboard/mouse support. No X support, not thing. This is just for developers. EVEN if linux worked fine on these machines, it still would be a waste to run linux because there aren't much commecial quality 3D apps in linux and.. ahem.. do you think SGI will release the Linux drivers WITH 3d accelerationfor the graphics card ?
Except Linux has a VERY cheesy 3D hardware support. Get it! If you need to do serious 3D stuff just buy an SGI or HP UNIX workstation (Starting at around $7000) or VPC running NT.
I've always been impressed at what SGI can pull out of hardware. Unfortunately, I have doubts that OSS developers will be able to write well-optimized drivers for SGI without knowing the internal workings...
Without that.. SGI is just another PC reseller now. Heavily optimized or not.. it's still NT.
The CEO (Beluzzo(sp)) used to be at HP, when they made their ill-fated decision to move away from doing real work.. and started reselling NT instead. As cool as SGI's hardware is.. I kind of doubt that it will really stay ahead of other PC systems for very long..
I wasn't just high when I read that SGI was going to be shipping Linux versions as well, was I?
This does not make sense...what would an 8 foot tall wookie from Kishi be doing living on Endor with a bunch of 2 foot tall Ewoks? It does not make sense!!! (Thanks Johnny Cochran... :)
== That terrible green-green grass, and violent blooms of flower dresses, and afternoons that make me sleepy.==
Hey, SGI people, how 'bout it?
Now, I don't actually want to run NT at all, and I know NT's still not appropriate for professional content creation, but still, I want to know! And I want Apple people to know just how these platforms --which slightly overlap their pricepoints -- really stack up. Not taking sides, yet --just burning with curiosity.
Speaking of burning, man that case has my dick dragging the pavement!
and not betting the entire company on this one until it starts getting some revenue. Only then, if they're convinced that it's working, they'll finish OpenGL and port Linux to it. Otherwise they'll just unload it for a stake in Hardware Canada Computing.
Look at Slashdtot articles for 2 days ago or so. SGI officialy anounced that they will be releasing a new line of x86 servers with full Linux and NT support.
SGI's press release was very vague -- it mentioned IA32 servers, not the VPC. My guess is that they will strip down a VPC and sell it as a File/Web server. Of course, my guess is that somewhere inside SGI there is a build of X and OpenGL under linux on the VPC, but whether it will see the light of day is another issue.
Considering that SGI has announced Linux support for these boxes I wonder if they would contribute code to the XFree86/Mesa multithreaded server project.
No, SGI announced Linux support for a new line of SGI's x86 servers that they will release pretty soon. They DID not mention VPC support.
I run NT at home and Linux at work. Aside from being a bit of a resource hog, NT4 SP3 is pretty solid (I wouldn't do anything silly like run a server on it, though). My system w/64MB naturally chokes on large graphics in Photoshop, but it doesn't grind too much otherwise.
SP4 doesn't seem quite so stable. It's crashed during boot a couple of times for reasons I cannot fathom, so when I migrate to my new box next week I'll be applying only SP3. Linux will be quite happy on the old box.
Photoshop is pretty far from what this machine is about. From what I've seen of other SGI machines, (Indy, Onyx) it's all about 3d modelling (and maybe 3d rendering.) You wouldn't want one to run photoshop-- for that there's the Mac, as you've said.
The real question is whether high-tech companies can really use NT instead of IRIX to do their topological biochemistry. The hardware sounds good, but the OS-- I'm not so sure. ('course, I've never used NT before, so what do I know?)
Having seen what SGI has done with past hardware, and seeing the hardware in the box, I don't think SGI will loose money on this machine.
I believe SGI is smart enough to release the specs for the hardware, esp with the rise in Linux and other OSS developments. The more versitile, the more buyers, more money.
Those of us who know why the SGI NT boxes suck wish you'd get your facts straight. There is no way in heck a Matrox G200 is anywhere near as fast as an SGI NT box.
With that said, one can easily build a system as fast as one of these new SGIs with stock parts and without the need to spend $600 for each proprietary 128MB RAM upgrade. Oh yeah, I guess some folks don't know about that neat little SGI trick yet.
And those folks raving about UMA and the high-bandwidth chipsets are clueless. You need high-bandwidth chipsets *because* of UMA. Modern PC architecture puts all that bandwidth on the graphics card where it is needed. It would be nice if Intel CPUs could do something with more that 800MB/s... And UMA means that the 128MB system that you paid for only has 96MB (it varies actually) of usable RAM. Why? because some of your RAM is used as a frame-buffer, Z-buffer, texture RAM, etc.
So, you buy a SGI NT box. One year later, when the graphics are no longer top of the line and you want to upgrade, what do you do? Heh... Ask all those people with O2s how they plan on upgrading their graphics hardware.
If you've got a stock PC with a nice high-end 3DLabs, E&S, or Intergraph card, you just yank out the old one and put in a new one. Viola! A quick upgrade. If you've got a decent motherboard, you upgrade the RAM and CPU(s) at the same time...
SGI's only goal in life lately is to screw their customers. Make a machine that clueless artists will drool over, and write specs that clueless managers think mean something. SGI is all marketing hype these days. The problem SGI faces is that those of us making the technology recommendations see right through that crap.
NT has UNWORKABLE font management/conversion problems.
NT has UNWORKABLE color management problems.
"What makes an unstable piece of sh** like Mac OS 8.x more appropriate than NT?" Hey -now that you know you can tell all your friends!
Service bureaus will just laugh at you if bring your (name your fave photo/quark formats) written on a NT fs disk. LAUGH: as in out loud, right in your face...Not that they won't print 'em --just expect a gazillion reproofs all at your huge expence! More to the point, people in the graphics/publishing/prepress biz have short, immoveable DEADLINES. It has to be CORRECT the first or second time. Sometimes printed colors must be matched to physical products such that trained eyes see NO DIFFERENCE. NT's problems introduce unacceptable RANDOMNESS into the creation/production process. Whatever else NT may be good enough for notwithstanding, this is one case where `good enough' or `pretty close' is literally as bad as `MY GOD, it looks like shit! I'm gonna lose my job!'
Yes, I know that MS has promised to work these problems out with Adobe and Quark, and for all I know it should be a small hurdle for a company w/ their resources. FACT REMAINS, though, that NT is not suitable at the present time. Mac OS 8.x is a frustrating piece de merde and I, for one, can't wait to see it gone; however, it is the only OS that has these absolutely crucial elements worked out. That, and only that is the reason why it is the standard OS in use in this area, to the point of exclusion of all others.
And that is why NT is not used in the graphics design/prepress biz except for the odd server in service bureaus (and SGI's are preferred there as well!)
I write Adobe and Quark from time to time begging them to port their stuff to Linux. Sure, reproducing the functionality of these companies' programs on Linux would take at least as much work as NT, (hmm. maybe less since there isn't that gnarly truetype to PostScript Level whatever problem to deal with) but at least they wouldn't be feeding the beast that in the end will devour them. And piss all over the market once it captures it.
I've performed some basic benchmarks using Pro/E on an Octane SE, Indigo 2 Elan, O2 CRM, VWS 320, HP C200 FX-2, and (Just for kicks) my Dell 350 w/ Rago Pro.
All results are in seconds.
Octane : 30 (~$22,000)
HP C200 : 48 (~$15,000)
VWS 320 : 46 (~$5,700)
Indigo 2 : 300+ (~$1500 used, I think)
O2 : 208 (~$17,000)
Dell : 0 (Blue screen o' death after a few seconds)
The point? Buy a VWS for Pro/E. You can't beat the Price/Performance on these babies. Keep in mind that this benchmark is ONLY relevant to Pro/E. Other applications will not reveal the same price/performance numbers. But you don't need me to explain that.
Blow it out your a-hole. Who cares. Apparently NetBSD's port to a NEW arch is boring for you Linux people, so why should the rest of us care that Linux is being ported to x86? Wait? What? Linux doesn't run on x86? Yeah whatever.
The revolution will be mocked
As what? You're not going to be able to run any high end packages on those machines. Linux is great for internet applications, but can it run any animation packages? Can id run any serious CAD? For that matter, can it do _ANY_ "visual computing?" Don't bring up GIMP and Blender, 'cause they just don't cut it.
Isn't the new wildcat 4100 delayed until Q4 1999? Even on AGP4, it'll still be slower than cobalt.
O2 with R10K costs around $14K or more BTW ..
The $6000 O2 with R5K CPU has really laughable SPEC95 results (i.e. below of my P233mmx)
But CPU is not the most important component in O2 and it is running IRIX(hmmmm).
ick!
Not trying to advocate NT here, I'm not a server or into placing heavy loads on my machine...
It would seem that perhaps running on a K6-233 May be part of the problem here... It also helps immensely if you have a SCSI system, compared to an IDE drive w/o ultra DMA or whatever it's called. NT, being a resource hog, barely runs in 64MB itself without swapping, add in an open Netscape window, some telnet windows, and a copy of Word, and maybe WinAMP in the corner, and you will definitely creep past 64mb...
However, this is where the disc drive subsystem and the CPU come in; it can be argued either way that NT is a 32 bit OS, as opposed to 95/98/3.1, and relies heavily on an optimized 32bit CPU like the PPro, P2, and Celeron, or vice versa that the CPU was tailored specifically for 32bit compute operations, and that the old Pentium line, and cousins and such, just aren't up to it-don't ask me, I've only run NT on a PPro 200 with a SCSI disc subsystem, and for my usage of Word, Netscape, email, telnet, and VC++, it works fine. For similar performance and usage on older hardware, Linux really does seem to be the way to go.
A lot of people think that SCSI is a rip-off, and stupid for being so more expensive that IDE, except that it takes 30% or so less CPU resources than standard IDEs; that can mean a lot for a swap happy OS like NT. However, spending an additional 70$ for another 64mb might be all that's needed to stop those swap stops you mentioned. Don't quote back numbers to me about ultra DMA IDE drives, and their bus mastering efficiency; I have no experience with that, though I would appreciate being informed and not flamed =)
-Twink
louisjr@cco.caltech.edu
This guy is an idiot- First off- in MAYA, there is no real-time rendering. Maya is the slowest renderer in the industry. I think he means real-time OpenGL shading, but it isn't the same thing.
Also, the SGI flat panel is $2600+, this isn't "almost $2000" as he states. Wildcat graphics won't touch the Cobalt graphics because of the lack of UMA. This guy calls himself a reseller?
Bonehead...
Try http://visual.sgi.com/research/ data/benchmarks.html for 2D and 3D benchmarks. These are preliminary results at product launch, the final
shipping drivers do significantly better.
Gumber sez:
The crossbar is 1.6 GBs/channel.
I don't even know why you are arguing this point. Get someone to give you a demo with multiple full motion uncompressed video streams running on one of these things and then try to explain why any standard intel PC can hold a candle to it.
I dont know why all you guys are getting so upset over whether or not linux is going to be supported... IT WILL! go to sgi's website and take a look. Also dont worry about the software it will come as popularity of the linux os grows.
So... you are saying that NT is unsuitable for content development because of font and color matching problems... And MacOS has those pieces...
Does XFree86 have color matching support?
Or would Adobe and/or Quard have to develop their own software for it?
And why does it not run Quake2? It has OpenGL :-) ...
O2 with a R5000 200Mhz CPU costs $6000! And this is certainly not the most impressive CPU on the market. R10000 kicks ass, but an O2 with 250MHZ R10000 costs around $15000
blender (for many, that and the gimp are why they even have linux)
any free software that uses GL
GLquake and family
any ported commercial ware.
then theres the competitive price performance...
yes you con run this stuff on an SGI(irix), but
you would pay far more for far less performance.
seriously, some of us like to code GL stuff. some
of us even do it for fun, and think linux is a more fun environment than NT. (ok, so some may think NT is more fun, but they have nothing to
complain about)
and, yes there are many corps, studios etc who have in house software written for irix or some other unix that they would rather port to linux
than to NT.
Based on my experience:
My setup is to use Linux/SGI's HP's as file and application servers. On my desktop (and at home) I use NT4 w. eXceed6 (the worlds best X server). It's a beautiful setup truley giving me the best of all worlds.
IMOHO NT4 is way more stable than linux for web browsing. IE4 and NT4 almost never crash even when I have 20 IE4 windows open.
Linux (RH 5.1/5.2, 2.0.34, 2.0.36, 2.2.0, 2.2.1) w. netscape (4.0, 4.5) consistently crashes when opening more than 5 or 6 netscape sesions at a time.
Plus when netscape crashes it also takes its mail client (and my mail-in-progress) with it. Not so for IE4/Outlook express.
If I could find a stable browser, and adequate O97 compatible Office Suite for linux I would use NT way less.
NT is also great for games, runs 1/2 life, unreal, quake, quake2, all the essentials. Only boot 95 for dx5/6 games.....
As to Microsoft Office. I hear you! Can not believe how shaky this product is, especially when stressed. However it is the "standard" and it is beautiful. The font rendering in WP8 for linux makes me want to puke.....
Good luck!
As for upgradeability, it seems that you are trying to have it both ways in your argument. By the time your world-beater PC video card grows long of tooth, you're ALSO going to be thinking about buying a new mainboard, CPU, or even replacing the machine...
Ah, well. Your rant sounds to me like you're just ticked off at the idea of giving your cash to SGI, even if you are going to be continually forking out money for new clone-PC upgrades, which only bring that "conventional" machine asymptotically closer to the original SGI performance.
3D performance is just great, but I'm not really impressed when it comes to system responsiveness.
Has anyone tried to start 3 or 4 avi movies ( QCIF ) simultaneously? Playing one movie will take up to 60% of your CPU, open another one, and it'll eat up 100%, open yet another one and you'll bring the machine down to its knees.
Another remark: are the WinNT OpenGL screensavers supposed to run faster than on any other machine? because they're really damn slow.
We'll buy the workstations and use them w. NT, as that's where our apps are.
But I can't wait until they have a server version of these things. I'd put linux on it in a heartbeat and use it to serve files to our Indys, Octanes, Indigo2s and NT workstations. Should be real sweet......
So you buy a nice high-end, generic PC and a year later you want to put in that new spiffy graphics card...and doh! It doesn't work with the AGP in your current system, you need a new mainboard with the latest, greatest, AGP spec. Oh, and that new graphics card cost nearly as much as a usable 320.
That makes sense...
i use both NT server (for IIS, Cold Fusion, Oracle and MSSQL) and workstation (Visual Studio, Dev/2000, browsers, email etc) and in my experience it's pretty solid. Some work needs doing, of course, but stuff like MTS has really made NT usable for serious applications. And as a workstation, NT blows away nearly anything else i've used, ultras, rs6000, AXPs the works. Fast, stable, rich GUI, essential apps - it's great!
they're not built for mainstream developers, tho' - i can't imagine someone writing business apps specifically for one of these...
Adobe does not "own" PostScript and free implementations exist. Also, I suspect that whaterver IP rights Pantone has can be worked around. You still buy their swatches, but Linux can do the color matching to them in OSS.
Sure it's a sexy machine.....
How many of you are really doing graphics that need this hardware?
If you double your frame rate when it's already 30
then are you spending your money in the right place?
Do you really expect it to perform well running NT?
(it's running NT because graphics software vendors
want to expand their markets to non-sgi machines....
SGI appears to be chasing after people who consider alternate plaforms)
Gigabits on the video bus mean nothing if you dont need them.
Also, this machine WONT scale....
You need to run different systems for that
(like the O2000 series.... now THAT is sexy hardware!).
-Eric
Any machine or cards shipped after NT 4 was
shrinkwrapped has to provide drivers somehow.
Since that date has long passed, SGI provide a
CD for drivers for their box just like everyone
else does usually via CD or their web sites.
All of the SGI additions will be part of the
NT 5 distribution, and this will install with no
SGI additions from Microsofts standard CD
distribution of NT 5 - if/when that ever appears.
Fatally flawed I think not!
First off:
Unlike the new-AGP-card-every-year crowd, you dont need to yank out the graphics hardware when "something new" comes out. Why? Because unlike the AGP stuff, the SGI graphics stuff is 3 x faster than the unreleased AGP 4x. So unless you can come up with a trick to fix that problem... Oh you say? Use more CPUs? With a FSB running at 800MB/s, how are you even going to keep the pipeline to AGP full while doing other tasks? Answer? Well, you cannot.
What adds insult to injury is that you CANNOT yank out your AGP card to put in an AGP2 card. You CANNOT yank out your AGP2 card to put in an AGP4 card... WITHOUT CHANGING THE MOTHERBOARD. This usually means memory upgrades, and many other nasties.
Ok, so we have ascertained that you are largely clueless about this. What I find scary is that people would take their recommendations from you.
Most people wont get these machines with under 256 MB ram. Most wont get them without bigger/better hard disks. If you are recommending base level systems, you have got to be a SunLuser or some other sort of insane pseudo-knowledgable weenie who has caused more damage to customers than any misconfigured OS you have ever installed.
Do yourself and your customers a favor. Go back to playing with Solarcrap.