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SGI to Dump NT Workstation Business, Move to Linux
Anonymous Coward writes "As part of its new restructuring SGI is spinning off its unprofitable NT workstation business and its Cray divisions. It will instead shift its Intel based products to Linux, integrating IRIX into Linux open-sourcing the merged technology, in preparation for using Intel platforms and Linux exclusively, according to Richard E. Belluzzo SGI CEO. " A lot of old news, but it's interesting to see that that they are spinning off the NT workstation business as well.
Is OGL accelarated? TIA
I bet this means an end to any SGI - Microsoft collaboration, look's like Open GL will be the domonant Graphics API. I guess this is good news for John Carmack :)
I wonder how this will pan out for SGI, but it certanly bodes well for Linux users.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Nevertheless, this certainly is exciting -- I always like to see this kind of thing happening.
See you, space cowboy...
Well, in Linux (and even Windows) you wouldn't have to do anything, since the OS would handle the memory properly. Really, you'd think the company that puts together the hardware would know enough about it to write software that actually takes advantage of it.
So...what's easier? Having the OS handle trivial things like that for you, or having to do it yourself?
And how the hell one expects to use Linux for graphics related tasks ? No fricking GL drivers, XFree is slow like dog ...
Come on !
NT is much better suited right know for this kind of work.
Even NT is better then Linux. NT magazine just proved this by pointing out that not only does linux doesnt scale as well as NT but it lacks essientials like multi threaded tcp/ip stacks and syncnous I/O. Zdnet demonstrated NT beating linux on every task available by a HUGE margin. Wether its samba file serving or internet serving, NT clearly is the leader. Name just one 3d animation package for linux besides blender? None. Its only available for NT. Irix had a few but there have all swiotched to NT because of supperior performance and scalability. SInce NT workstations perform better with cheaper hardware it proves that NT is the winner for engineers. NT magazine just put out an article showing NT finally outselling unix workstations and the money going into the workstation market came from unix boxes because they cost twice as much as NT boxes. A bugs life was made on NT. If it can handloe that then it can handle muy bussiness. SGI. You have just nailed yourself in a coffin. Instead of slugging NT you just slugged yourself out of the market instead. All youtr 3d animation developers left IRix for windows thanks to microsofts obbessive marketing team who travels to company to company to make sure they switch to NT. Linux may be a great technical achievment but NT runs the world and I will but only Dells now for my engineering team at work. I will always remember you in terms of computer history. Perhpas you may be as seccussfull as VA research. Oops you workstations cost more then an alpha NT or unix box. Unix will never die but NT is here to stay in the engineering and bussiness fields.
3 years ago an idea about "integrating IRIX to Linux" had no sense it all. Does it makes sense now?.. Don't think so. How about integrating Solaris into AIX? :-)
I think the whole Monterey project will end up going down in flames...let's face it, Monterey is basically SCO ported to Power architectures...who needs or wnats that??
Certainly someone at IBM must be starting to realize that worldwide demand for SCO is dropping faster than a lead zeppelin.
It's no coincidence that you haven't heard much about Monterey recently
First, I have to say that Macs are fine for graphics. I have a dear friend who's running LightWave on his old 200 Mhz 604e, with a slow bus. And he manages to produce some wonderful 3d images. The new G3s aren't bad either. Having a 100 Mhz bus helps. And no, neither of us suffer from Amiga Persecution Complex.
Say, why is it that nobody is complaining about the fact that the crack box is running LinuxPPC on a PowerMac 9500? Aren't Macs horrible bitty boxes?
I dont think they will fork of an own kernel source, but I can see they maintaining an huge tree of SGI patches to the standard kernel with all changes that Linus dont want to include in the standard kernel. This way they can have thier own kernel without having to split it of.
They will still provide NT as an option for their Intel workstations and servers, its just that Linux is their main OS option for Intel boxes. And IRIX will still be developed and shiped with their MIPS servers becoz its what the customers want and the only option. To run Linux on their MIPS servers they have to rewrite it totaly from scratch and fork off an own kernel source tree. Why do you ask? Linux can only scale desent to 2-way SMP, IRIX scales great to 256-way SMP, IRIX has ccNUMA, Linux dont, IRIX has highperformance journaling filesystes, Linux dont, IRIX is focused on "real" computing (supercomputing), ie: climate modelling, fluid dynamics, dna secuencing, weather modelling, virtual reality, geo (oil & gas exploration) and other heavy computing tasks. These kind of customers dont care about the price, they want the best shit they can get, they can spend $5.000.000 on an Origin 2000 server.
"The traditional supercomputer market is not really going anywhere anyway, with the trend clearly more towards commodity architecture clusters typified by Beowulf."
These are two completely different architectures, designed for solving very different problems. Why do people think that they are always interchangeable.
Just because it's avaible (for both the Mac & Linux) lends little to the argument. Developers won't use it until they can depend on it being included with the OS. Unless they want to license a version from someone, in which there maybe 4 or 5 different providers who all have slightly different implentations of it, and therefore you'll end up with several different versions of software that provides nearly identical functionality.
I'm not trying to bash anyone here, I'm just saying that we'll see a lot more 3D development once at least Redhat (which happens to seem to be the most popular distro) includes OpenGL as an option in it's installer.
But then you'll see Apps with requirements of Redhat Linux 6.x rather than just saying that they're for "Linux". And you may have to endure downloading the software from another site est the licence includes verbage to the effect that you can't distribute the software with something that you money for.
Personaly, I fail to see what diffrence an OS would make as far as graphics. Remember, were talking about *non-realtime* rendering, and stuff like photoshop. The hardware would matter *a lot* more then the OS. We arn't goint to involve the OS at all (I think), unlike things like Web Server.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
For SGI there's only one thing that counts: selling hardware. Their IRIX workstations have long been top quality graphics workstations but now slowly IRIX is beginning to backfire. SGI does not have a large portion of the UNIX market -> nor does IRIX. Keeping an OS up to date with modern technology is hard and expensive. So if SGI changes to linux (NT fails on the modern (new :)) technology part), they gain a lot: (1) thy no longer have to maintain an entire OS (2) suddenly a lot of applications can run on their systems (3) they have a free ride on OSS, great for PR.
...
They still have their hardware patents and knowledge to guarantee that they can deliver superior hardware (after all they've always targeted the high end workstation market)
So to me it seems perfectly logical that they do this in order to survive.
Of course it may backfire:
Company X comes up with a nice workstation that is able to compete with SGI's stuff, Old IRIX users are pissed of because IRIX is no longer supported,
Jilles
well, it's pretty unlikly that all the OSS people will stop developing Linux, but if they do SGI can afford to pay the people who worked on IRIX to work on it
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Oh, Ghod, I wish that you hadn't mentioned the buttons. I was feeling pretty good until then ... does anyone besides me have a button on their cubicle wall that says "MIPS/NT:Because the future is too important to be left to Intel"? Yes, it is a big button, and I remember them well ...
If, as a general concensus you believe that the main downfall of SGI of late has been,
1- Oversaturation of UNIX variants, of which they are one of the weakest
2- Recent advances by PC technology to provide powerful visual workstations, a direct competition
3- lack of interest in MIPS hardware, fierce competition from IBM and Sun in the ever encroached high-end server market.
Then someone about a year ago of course would have seen a dead end road coming about and oust the CEO. A immediate move could have been to join the competition (if they are moving to NT, then we'll compete on NT.)
It is good for them to see the other alternative. One that benifits the hardware manufacturer as well as the users. It is a gamble, to move this direction. It will pay off if other big names (IBM, HP) join in. Does it look like that might happen?
I'm now waiting for the fall of AIX, I think it will be next. (I don't count BSDi or SCO, to me they are dead already.) Indeed, IBM may be working in that direction since the main money (support and hardware) they can still provide. They are supporting Linux on almost everything they depend on AIX for.
I think IBM is simply bigger and it takes more time to maneuver, but they are working that direction also. Once Catia, and other big dollar Apps finaly switch over, what will there be left to stick around with AIX? Surely they see it, maybe they even want it.
^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^~
That is only if SGI releases their code.
Agreed. I smell a dead horse.
It seems to me that SGI hasen't stuck with any product long enough to actually sell it and develope a market. It is cool to seem them jump on the Linux bandwagon. Hopefully we (the users) will see some good stuff come out of it. However, I can't help but think that SGI is hopeing that Linux will kick a bit of life back into a mostly dead company.
YYAHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! hehehe thats all i have to say heheh (not very intellectual but what the hell)
I've been looking at Corel, and their stock has improved immensely after they started flirting with Linux.
Do you know why the x86 clone market is like this? Its because people want it this way.
No one cares about whiz-bang boxes and graphics cards that are 10% better than ATI stock cards.
SGI CANNOT COMPETE WITH DELL
Linux is fucking at least two times slower on the desktop .
Even if that were true, which I don't believe, at least not as a general case, what does it have to do with what we were talking about? The example was talking about IRIX, not Linux.
"The traditional supercomputer market is not really going anywhere anyway, with the trend clearly more towards commodity architecture clusters typified by Beowulf."
These are two completely different architectures, designed for solving very different problems. Why do people think that they are always interchangeable.
They are clearly different architectures. The traditional (read X/YMP series) Cray architecture machines were superfast uniprocessor machines, however many of the later Cray machines were tightly coupled multiprocessor machines. Beowulf machines are loosely coupled clusters of (usually uni but sometimes dual) processors.
However it is obvious that most of the traditional supercomputer market has been in decline for some time, with such former vendors as Control Data dropping out entirely. Even many of the tightly-coupled multiprocessor supercomputer vendors have had serious financial problems. Cray wasn't doing well even before SGI bought them out.
Although they require different types of programming and have their own set of strengths and weaknesses for solving certain types of problems, machines of the loosely coupled Beowulf type are clearly taking over the market from specialized supercomputer hardware.
here I go again..
First of all, if anyone takes the time to read the article instead of looking at the Anon cowards comments you know SGI is not "dumping NT" but spinning it off to a partner (my guess is Dell, because Dell was already re-selling their flat panel monitors).
It never ceases to amaze me that slashdot, which normally has decent oversight of articles, will post the biggest piles of biased shit when it comes to anything with the word Microsoft in it. Last time I checked, the slogan was "News for Nerds", not "News for rabid Microsoft-haters". I guess the whole world is getting more tabloid by the minute.
Secondly, if anyone has any experience with the SGI NT Workstations, you know that they were providing commodity hardware at a premium price. I'm only going to pay so much more for a cool purple box. Plus it had some weird quirks like a proprietary output for its flat panel and only one video card to support it.
The Microsoft-haters out their can view this as problem with NT, but you would be kidding yourself. SGI is hoping the Linux hype can float their boat a little longer. Fine, whatever helps your company, but don't bash NT because SGI has problems.
i didn't know SGI owned cray...
i think it's a good move for SGI, NT is not good for graphics or anything near high-end computing. maybe this will improve linux's standing in high-end commerical computing
This is a good thing. SGI has a lot to offer to Linux, and the more companies that have a vested interest in Linux's success, the better the support we'll get for Linux.
With the neat things like the journalled file system and other enhancements, Linux is going to be looking better and better. I think Linux finally has enough of a foothold to stay in the picture no matter how hard MS fights.
Knock on wood.
good riddance NT
(`._(`._( , , . JimmyPop[nL] . , , )_.)_.)
It's not the machine
thats bitty and crappy.
It's the os.
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
I suspect that a slight problem with this approach could be that on NT, many other applications are available than on Linux. At least in the heavy graphics/modeling/animation/rendering areas. This might upset people who use the Visual Workstations on NT. On the other hand, this might mean that more 3rd party people get an incentive to port their apps to Linux, which of course is always a good thing...
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
I was specifically talking about putting that much money *on your desk* as your workstation. Do you really have a $80k PC on your desk? (which is for your personal use only, not just a server that happens to be stored on your desk.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
SGI's fortunes have been waning for some time. Clinging to Linux is not the answer. Just look at Corel.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that SGI is adopting Linux, but I can't help wondering if they'll dump Linux when the "next big thing" hits their marketing department.
All of this was stated in the press release yesterday. But how will SGI spin off the Visual Workstation running NT and keep the same system running Linux? It's the same computer, isn't it?
SGI announced a few weeks ago that the Visual Workstations would come with Linux pre-installed this fall (right now it's just "Linux ready"). But the press release from yesterday (as far as I recall) didn't mention Linux on this hardware. In fact, I thought they might have meant the entire Intel line of workstations would be spun off.
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
HAL9000
Hopefully that shared code base won't have a heavy religious slant in the Linux direction. There are code bases out there just as good, if not better, that don't deserve to be chucked out the window just because it isn't Linux.
This move really scares me. Although flexibility is definitely a good thing, I am getting the impression that SGI has a short attention span. First the stupid rebranding a few months ago, now this. They need to be able to stick with a plan for more than a year. The visual workstations may not have been selling like hotcakes, but they are fairly new to the market and sport cutting edge and proprietary interfaces (cobalt graphics & pci64). Peripheral manufacturers are just now starting to catch up.
And positioning themselves as a player in the non-existant streaming media server market seems rather ridiculous. A good server just needs great disk/memory IO, which competitors like Sun already have.
SGI has lost its dominance in the graphics market and is now confused. Like netscape, they are forever repositioning themselves because they can't find a strategy that makes a profit. Netscape was a client company, then a server company, then a portal, then AOLs toy.
So SGI do a good thing, embrace open software. Not only is this good for the community, it is also good for their business. IRIX systems never developed the 'network' of vendors and support that is necessary. With Linux's seeming dominance of the UN*X field (is there any UN*X platform that doesn't emulate linux binaries?) it will be much easier to integrate SGI's products into existing environments.
I only hope that SGI can keep its focus long enough and continue its great R&D so that it can actually make an impact in the industry. At least if it does die a pitiful death its legacy will live on in the code that it opens.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Something that I haven't seen mentioned, but I think has to be important, is the impact on internal morale this must have. The SGI rank-and-file, as Unix people, must have been demoralized by the switch to NT. Imagine the positive effect the new tilting-towards-Linux strategy must be having?
Dumping Cray is smart just from the standpoint that SGI never seemed to be able to really capitolize on Cray. The traditional supercomputer market is not really going anywhere anyway, with the trend clearly more towards commodity architecture clusters typified by Beowulf.
Dumping their NT sales is smart because SGI is not equipped to compete in that sort of market. They need to be in areas where people are willing to pay for quality (the high end). People who are the customers for NT in general are not interested in paying for quality. They want cheap, commodity hardware/software. They are often not willing to pay for balanced subsystems or high performance I/O. Many buy based primarily on clock-speed and whiz-bang advertising. They look at SGI's $5000 450MHz Xeon and think that some generic clone vendor's 450MHz Xeon box is comparable, just because it has the same processor. SGI just isn't the right company to make it in that sort of market. Even the established high end PC vendors (Compaq, HP, IBM, etc) have had trouble being consistantly profitable with their high end PC workstation business, and none of them really went to the extremes of breaking out of the PC design mold that SGI did.
Unfortunately for PC-clone vendors, Microsoft has structured the market so that most of the potential profits go to Redmond, and that just doesn't leave the margins there for companies like SGI.
I dislike Microsofts business practices as much as anyone. However, I would much rather see Microsft put in its place by the market rather than the government. Companies moving their products to Linux, or at leas porting to them, or any other OS for that matter is what I'd like to see. What SGI is doing is an example of this. It is very unlikely that anyone will see more than a slap on the wrist come from the DOJ anyway.
I don't mean to question that this is a good thing for Linux and for the community. Their support for open-source software, with no fancy non-GPL licenses and no strings attached, is unequivocally better than any other Unix vendor's. Actually, I think the kind of cost-saving outsourcing opportunity that SGI sees in Linux is a really good thing for everyone concerned. Hopefully the next few years will see an explosion in this kind of cooperation and a dramatic reduction in wasteful duplication of effort, just as RMS has always predicted.
No, I'm more concerned about the idea of blindly embracing Intel's latest product, which looks to be the kludgiest chip ever invented, with horrific cooling requirements, two silicon-wasting legacy instruction sets, and tons upon tons of cache to make up for absent registers. That's not to mention the fact that the damn thing still hasn't been released.
It's like SGI has decided that high-end computing doesn't pay off, so it's just trying to be another PC vendor. Where is the visionary company of yore? I hope that, at the least, they will keep their position of innovation in graphics. It looks as if they're trying to do that.
Good luck, SGI.
Beer recipe: free! #SourceCold pints: $2 #Product
This recent string of announcements seems funny to me. When I think of SGI, I think of the company that brought us Open GL and high-powered graphics oriented computers. All any of these articles are talking about is servers and what operating systems they are running. Big deal. Companys that make servers are a dime a dozen. I want to know what they are going to do to make Linux a serious graphics platform. There is a lot of talk on this subject now (things that will appear), but Pixar and ILM aren't going to buy SGI Linux boxes if they can't do anything with them. Support for there proprietary graphics hardware under Linux and some serious 3D modeling software that takes advantage of it is what SGI needs, not strategy shifts and new names for there server lines.
How is this bad for the trial?
Did MS have a monoply in the past? I think so. (But this isn't illegal in itself.) Did MS abuse this monoply? I think so. (This would be the illegal part.) If the trial finds them guilty it will be for actions in the past that abused a past monoply. MS can lose this monopoly, but the court can still find that they had (past tense) a monoply and abused it to gain an advatange in new markets and had anti-competitive practices.
If you commit a crime and then become the most upstanding citizen in town, it doesn't make you any less guilty of the crime. Even if you are truely sorry and realize the evil of your ways the crime has still been committed and you are still the guilty party. Your sentenance may be reduced, but I doubt MS will get off so easy they didn't repent before they started getting investigated. If they are found guilty they were caught pretty much red-handed.
But then again, IANAL.
--
?
Oh, Ricky, I am so sorry for all the names I called you. When you were at HP and HP was on the verge of dumping HP-UX for NT... And then you left HP for SGI, which suddenly was about to become just an NT reseller...
But I guess you weren't a total borg unit after all.
Maybe you're still a trend-following clueless corporate doofus, but dammit, you're our trend-following clueless corporate doofus!
ANybody know if this will drop the cost of an SGI box?
hi there... i'm one of the NT tech support gang for sgi... i'm logged in as AC because, well, i don't feel very safe..:) honestly, those of us who are working on this project are learning everyhting from slashdot, and other news sources... methinks everythings up in the air right now.... just a few quick answers: a: we have no clue down here in tech supprt. b: we're sticking with cobalt chips, but nvidia's working on our drivers with us now, i've heard. c:nope. they'll be putting info out there, but sgi moves at a stately pace, and we'll need the OSS community's acceptance for anything we do.... d:not really- it just has room for more processors and ram..it's the hardware you fill it with that makes a difference. e: seems to work okay...haven't fiddled with it much here... f:none. you may install linux on a 320, but it is not officially supported. this will change soon i believe.
Wonder if they will be making their own Linux Distribution. Irix Linux style =) kinda catchy...
I don't know what life is, but no one gets out alive...N
IBM and SGI are great R&D companies, but have lossy marketing and market positioning. IBM has been positioning AIX as a stable web server, but they are also jumping all over the Linux bandwagon. IBM is also helping SCO (and others) to create Monterey, the "new Unix". What is IBM trying to do here? IBM has great technology, but seems be have the big-company-syndrome where the right-hand doesn't know what the left-hand is doing/saying. IBM is just confusing its customers (and itself) by pushing so many different operating systems.
cpeterso
What they're really doing is shifting from the highly competitive desktop market to internet servers. Since Linux has always been the preferred OS for backroom web servers while NT has always been the desktop choice, they're naturally dropping NT. It's no new big news for Linux.
GL is hardware acelerated on the 320/540 under
linux. However, texture mapping is still a little
buggy. Expect to see this available to the public
in the near future, pending the release of
XFree86 4.0 along with the new DRI. Interestingly
enough, HP also has hardware GL acceleration under
linux for there visualize workstation.
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
Dunno about Sun, but IBM has been putting increasing emphasis in Linux in recent times. Gotta kind of wonder how Monterey fits into all this, now that IBM's also helping to port Linux to Merced. I'm betting that Monterey either gets dropped completely or is marketed as a high end solution and Linux as a low-end one.
of course they will. won't you? i will.
They're cool for desktop publishing,
but they've long since lost any edge
that they had in any of the standard
graphics markets, and are (Despite
they're current efforts) worthless
for 3D.
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
the 320/540 outperform the dell boxes and would
win in price/performance if SGI hadn't made a critical error, every VPC comes with video editing hardware. Most of the workstation users simply want a CAD solution so they _may_ opt for the other box, but here is where you're seriously misinformed...
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
I'd certainly agree that there are other code bases out there with some great features. What we can hope for is to see them incoporated into Linux or some other open-source OS so everyone can benefit from them. That is why we should root for Linux over proprietary Unices. As more and more companies turn to Linux, I expect a bit of the zealotry to subside; we just need to stand fast and demand to see the source.
Online multi-player Open role-playing game? World Forge
the 320/540 outperform the dell boxes and would
win in price/performance if SGI hadn't made a critical error, every VPC comes with video editing hardware. Most of the workstation users simply want a CAD solution so they _may_ opt for the other box, but here is where you're seriously misinformed...
In the workstation market, the cost of the computer is a very small percent of the cost of seating an engineer at a workstation. Most of the cost is in paying the salary of the engineer. So _any_ small increase in the performance of the workstation will boost the performance of their larger investment in the engineer. Pay a little more for your workstations or pay a hell of a lot more for more engineers, not a tough decision.
Mike
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
I probably couldn't make any money reselling NT licenses either - we just got one today from a large company, a laptop w/ NTWorkstation, preconfig'd w/ NetBEUI, so I deleted that and installed TCP/IP, and NBT worked ok, could access server shares, but none of the Internet stuff worked, no IE, no FTP, get "bind: invalid parameter". After diddling around for half a day upgraded to SP5 (came w/ 4) and that was the magic bullet. Jeeze, if you HAVE to spend time config'ing something to get it to work it may as well be open. Layperson end users STILL need access to someone who makes NT a career to manage it.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
regarding c)
SGI is demonstrating a 320 with hardware accelerated GL on linux at LinuxExpo.
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
Heh, quite a coincidence, but the banner ad I have right now is for an SGI Linux box. (:
/dev/null, nor giving up on MIPS and IRIX, but they're spinning them off to independant companies which is a bit sad - much as I like to see NT declared unprofitable, it's sad to see Cray and IRIX grouped there, too.
Anyway, this is obviously really good for Linux in general - it's a huge push by a big company with a lot of resources (granted, less than they had a few years ago). I'm also glad to see NT declared "unprofitable".
I know they're not exactly dumping Cray into
Still... it's better than losing SGI. And maybe now there's finally a chance of getting Electropaint on Linux! for those who don't know, it's this really simple-yet-amazing OpenGL demo that came with IRIX.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
If SGI godes under, this could become "Let's all ditch this Linux thing before it drags us down like it did SGI!".
This would be much more of a problem if SGI had bet on Linux when they were profitable and then went down the tubes. Since SGI is already in serious financial trouble, if they fail now, the worst you can say is that their move to Linux failed to rescue them. But you certainly can't say it was what did them in.
The way I read it, they aren't ditching the Visual Workstation. They are ditching the idea of running NT on the Visual Workstation. This is a smart idea, and not just because I like Linux better than NT. The problem is that the kinds of customers who are into NT are generally not the same sorts of customers who will pay for the highest-end whizbang hardware. They want cheap Dells and Gateways. The sorts of customers who are willing to pay $5000 for a workstation that has amazingly fast busses and cards are usually the sort who don't mind using Unix. This was SGI's dumb mistake. The intersection of the set of all people who prefer NT and the set of all people who care about high bus rates and high end graphics is a very small set. They might get a few graphic designers in the movie industry and that's about it.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
An important thing to bear in mind when questioning why SGI picked up NT a year ago and then dropped it is that SGI had plans for the NT Visual Workstations over 2.5 years ago, well before Rick Belluzo came into the game. Belluzo saw it for the mistake it was, but was basically too late to stop it from happening. He's put a cap on it before it gets much worse. So what looks likes inconsistency in the company as a whole is really just the change of hands from a CEO (Ed) who threw really great parties on campus (everybody remember Hewey?) to a CEO (Rick) who hasn't proven himself one way or another.
Not all contributors are *anonymous*
"Gravity must be scholastic occult quality or the effect of a miracle."
Boy, this was a troll if ever I read one. Still, you're reading too much into it. If anything, it said GOOD things about NT. There was TOO MUCH COMPETITION. That means LOTS of people are selling NT boxes. All it means is that SGI can't compete in the NT market. No big deal. This NT developer isn't worried.
hah! If they weren't so damned expensive and proprietary (half-length sdram??) they might be profitable. Sure they have expensive OpenGL graphics cards, but are they really $2000 dollar cards?
ugah.
--- lokai
on the heels of the SGI announcement, at least one "name" in the 3D Imaging world decided to hitch their wagon to SGI and Linux.
:-(.
One thing the SGI announcement does is give Linux instant cachet as a 3D rendering platform. Now all we have to do is get XFree86 4.0 out the door so that the OS matches the hype
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
WE can't get NT to run at all - never mind graphics. Good for nothing except erasing hard-drives.
Mikkkrosoft: software that 'werks.
Linux + Corel = profit. Corel was losing money left and right until they latched onto Linux. Now they've had two straight quarters of profitability, and expect more.
SGI may be hoping the same happens for them.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Thing is, SGI is a hardware company. The OS is a cost item for them in the first place, not a profit center. In that context, Linux makes a lot of sense -- think, a low cost OS that we can customize as we see fit? The thing about NT was that SGI was not allowed to customize it, thus SGI's NT boxes looked just like Compaq's NT boxes looked just like Dell's NT boxes ..... SGI could not put their "stamp" on their NT boxes to make them special, and people avoided them in droves.
I think SGI will sell at LEAST as many Linux boxes within the next year as they sold NT boxes last year. Of course, considering the pitifully small number of NT boxes that they sold last year (38,000?), that won't be hard to do.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I would like to see Linux be implemented and supported on all architectures so that companies like SGI could say, "Linux is Great! And, it's even better on SGI hardware."
Each manufacturer would contract or contribute to the common codebase so as to make sure that their hardware is well represented - then they make their profit by offering high-availability, scalability, reliability in terms of hardware.
SGI could then say that their hardware provides specific benefits that are undeniable - integration with SGI hardware and extended XFS functions, super optimised OpenGL graphics, super high graphic bandwidth etc...
Everybody wins because applications could be sold that run on any hardware due to Linux's common codebase. SGI applications could be produced that run on IBM RS/6000's or PA/RISC or SparC - it wont matter what architecture you have.
I believe that there is room at the high-end; especially in clustering technologies as well as massively SMP systems. SGI should take their Cray and MIPS technologies and do some of these things. Reduce the cost per node but sell a whole lot more of them!
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Another reason this is good is because a company is staking it's profit on Linux. Previously, large companies like IBM, Dell, etc. each invested in Linux, but not to the depth that they couldn't pull out. Now, SGI is the first large company, IMHO, that is investing its future in Linux. Of course, they can't really lose either because Linux is already stable and fast and that's what they sell....
Still, it is nice to see a large company decide that it will live or die by the whims of thousands of seemingly anonymous contributors.
SGI, what are you smoking? You don't know whether to sh*t of get off the pot lately...
IF someone from SGI is reading this or if someone "in the know" could help my dilema:
Im a happy user of a 320 that i use to run NT apps (3D max / ACAD et al )
I have a order pending for a 540 (that i may convert to a 320 since here no one ever saw a 540)which i am planning will be only to run linux.
Meanwhile i saw the news about the restructuring in SGI and i have several doubts:
a) Which is the future of the VW line? Will it be updated or is it adead line ?
b) Will SGI (and/or the "partner" or NVIDIA ) continue to improve the excelent architecture or future VW will use crappy AGP like pecees?
c) about Linux: could one expect to see, independently of the questions
above, full 3D graphics on the 320/540 in the NEAR future (september)?
d) regarding the 540 : besides the fact it can hold 4 Xeons and be a lot more expensive , is there from a performance standpoint any reason to buy a 540 over a 320 to run linux?
e) for those on the field is it realistic to buy a SGI VW (be it 320 or 540) for Linux work?
f) Whats the status of FULL Linux support for the VW a few months ago?
Thanks in advance
Best regards
P.S.: Drop the VW line is a very dumb thing! Here in portugal SGI wont
sell many more exclusively because it doesent have them for delivery . Besides its the NT business that is Wrong not the Workstation business ans this things properly crafted have everithing to eat SUNs lunch and be THE linux workstations and if someone from SGI is reading this belive me THERE IS A MARKET not only for servers but also for Linux Workstations!
"The emergence of Linux as an industry standard, and the fact that Linux is better than any proprietary version of Unix, led SGI to reassess its position in the Windows NT market, Vrolyk said."
Wow I wonder if Sun, IBM, etc. know that Linux is better.
SGI is not getting rid of NT. Merely spinning off the division. It'll still be around.
Where did you get 3.3.4 ? I might be stupid but I have had a hard time finding it. The XFree ftp directories for it were empty...coming soon or something like that... I need support for my piece o crap S3 3DTRIO card...
I found it on rufus and downloaded the source RPM from RH6.0 contrib RPMS. which can be found here: ftp://contrib.redhat.com/contrib/libc6 /SRPMS (the Rufus link is incorrect, as the Redhat directory structure has changed slightly.)
.tgz file.
If you don't want an RPM . . . use alien to convert it to a
--Akeru
Let's hope that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space 'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.
I think IBM sees Linux filling in the low end server market that NT serves. It'll run on virtually any box and is cheap, (and more importantly cuts MS out of the low end server market that is financing their invasion of server application business). Linux still doesn't any of the management tools and high end features that AIX has and Monterrey will have.
Remember, if they make their own version of the kernel, they still have to release the source. If their version is good, people will fold their changes into the mainstream kernel. If not, who cares?
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
SGI has to demonstrate that it can make money with linux. Heck, it has to demonstrate that it can just make money.
As to supporting linux, that's great. Linux this. Linux that. Yet another marketing press release. Check company stock price. Repeat. Ho-hum.
As to the next big thing... As long as it's unix-based or includes GNU sourcecode not only will I be happy, but I will have been involved in it. So if it's called embedix or hurd or floofloo, It doesn't really matter.
So... to get back to the main question. How will SGI fare as a whitebox (okay, purple/grey box) manufacturer???
Hmmm, you never had to work on the things then.. Damned buggy network code, the IRIX OS is only just good enough to keep the apps running, it's not very stable judging from the problems (e.g. system crashes) my housemate gets at work, his machines crash more often than any of the Suns or Linux boxes I use, but less than any NT box I use.
... If IBM bought CRAY????
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
So, uh, what is this:
http://www.apple.com/opengl/
I've been using it for about 2 months now...
- Isaac =)
Having just upgraded to XFree 3.3.4, I didn't even have to recompile the glx module for the TNT2, and I saw a deffinate performance increase (along with the absence of a nasty memory leak that seemed to plague the Nvidia release). So what exactly you mean by "play" I don't know, Quake 1, 2, and 3 run just fine . . . and Xracer and 1600x1200 is simply amazing ;)
--Akeru
Let's hope that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space 'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.
Bravo, SGI!
No sig.
I actually thought their NT move was a good one. They were a hardware company, not an OS company and so offloading that to someone else made a lot of sense to me.
By the same token, I think their move to Linux is a good one. They can continue to make the development investment needed to support their hardware while garnering good press from giving back to the Linux community and leveraging the growing Linux installed base, which gives them economies not offered by maintaing their own OS. At the same time, they gain more autonomy than they had under NT, since Linux gives them a bit more room to innovate than creating extentions to NT.
I used to love SGI, but things just have gotten sadder & sadder with them ...
Strategy: We have over-priced servers & workstations.
Solution: Oust the CEO, bring in Windows NT.
Problem: NT doesn't sell & we still have IRIX servers.
Solution: Bring in Linux, drop MIPS, and use Merced.
Doesn't this seem like a "XXX will save us!" panacea strategy? I'm really glad this means one less UNIX thread, and I hope some of IRIX's innovations are incorporated into Linux (such as their accelerated X server). I really do want to see kick-ass Linux FX workstations too.
BUT, Linux is just an operating system. It can't cure a sick company by itself. Execution is what counts.
-Stu
However, I do think that it's much better for Linux to win than for Microsoft to lose. If the companies fleeing to Linux for help can actually work with the Open Source community, contributing their efforts and their publicity, then we might have a winner on our hands.
Of course, as it has been pointed out before, as soon as Linux hits it big, most developers will leave for the "next big thing". Oh well. That's my opinion only.
Wah!
That's the somewhat unclear part. MIPS will stick around, and SGI/MIPS hardware is something that would be a very sad thing to loose. Putting IRIX stuff into Linux is one thing, but my question is how willing are they to replace IRIX on MIPS with Linux?
When pondering a SGI purchace on the low end of the MIPS spectrum (from old Indy's for $600 to O2's that can go over $10,000), it would be nice to have that as an additional choice to x86 and G3. But, the reason I personally won't do it is because of IRIX... I could consider some of the used SGI/MIPS hardware from a financial point, but affording to keep up with IRIX is what holds most people back. SGI has been fairly supportive about getting Linux on the Indys...and I hope that continues.
GNU/GPL OS like Linux means you get the choice to put in some time to keep things current rather than putting money into OS subscriptions for something commercial like IRIX. That would be a new market segment for SGI's hardware, possably benifiting them greatly. But I don't see SGI making it very clear that they fully intend on helping Linux get up to speed and scaliable for some of the higher end hardware, and until they do that, I don't think they will let go of IRIX completely, only allow Linux to use parts of it so that it can be more compatiable with thier higher end hardware.
I'm sorry I am not as excited as everyone else about SGI doing Intel/Linux, to me, it's sorta just another Linux Hardware Vendor (which is good considering it _is_ SGI, and they are doing cool things even with Intel based hardware, but not overly thrilling). What I would like to see is a clearer stance on the scale up of Linux to MIPS, and how they might be willing to support Linux projects to help make Linux more ready for >4 CPU's, MIPS hardware, etc...
I wish SGI the best of luck, but I'm really not sure it's enough to keep them afloat. Linux is by no means a magic bullet.
*sigh*
I really do hope I'm wrong about their ability to survive, though. It may be stupid, but the way most people (particularly management) would see Linux's inability to save a dying company as a general indictment of its commercial viability.
If SGI godes under, this could become "Let's all ditch this Linux thing before it drags us down like it did SGI!".
Maybe I'm just being morbid.
On second thought, all SGI needs to do is bring back the Cube. That'd make everything ok again.
---
DNA just wants to be free...
dear me... I even used preview...
:%s/godes/goes/
---
DNA just wants to be free...
Good luck SGI!
If anyone here uses the STL under Linux you should be rooting SGI on too!
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
'Nuff said
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to see such a large company getting involved in Linux and contributing to its development. But don't you think that it looks like sinking SGI is looking for anything to keep it afloat. It'll be
painful to see if this involvement will not bring a sufficient financial return for SGI.
What if SGI will not be able to hang around before its Linux business takes off? That could be easily used as an argument in "Open Source/Linux oriented business model" debate.
Of course, I'm have no formal business education and talk here out of my ass, but I'd rather see them stepping slowly into the water than taking a fast dive.
Which SUCKS. People buying a $5K or $10K graphics workstation are not interested in a "Heathkit" experience, and that's just what the current Linux desktop is. No way would a corporate droid dump his NT desktop for something 2x or 3x as expensive that doesn't run the garden-variety apps that make a small or large company run on time. This whole Linux hype might just crash to earth soon after enough people get a belly full of Gnome, KDE, or whatever else they try and run while trying to get some meaningful work done.
Looks like SGI may be the purest Linux play next to RedHat...
The way you say that makes me shudder. I hope Linux can live up to everything SGI wants it to do... Otherwise we'll lose a great company (granted it's in rough shape right now). They, and every company, should have contigency plans... Looks like that went out the window.
Hey all,
I'm out here in L.A. at SIGGraph '99, and I
must say I'm impressed with SGI's position.
They have a new 1400L on the floor, along
with a 320 running Linux and (here's the best
part) Performer running on Linux. They're
handing out tons of little "Linux and SGI"
buttons and cool OpenGL buttons with Tux on
them.
They still have a large NT section, but it's
not as big as I thought; most of their presence
is large terrain modeling and visualization with
their huge Origin and Onyx2 systems. Everyone
I've talked to is *really* psyched about the
Linux bit. Seems they're all ready to dump
NT and run with the Irix/Linux integration.
-Mike
--- witty signature
While this applies specifically to Intel-based SGI systems -- not the big NUMA servers and MIPS workstatsions -- it may represent an incremental strategy to move completely to Linux over the next 5-10 years. SGI seems to be a company that could really benefit from moving completely to Linux. Unfortunately, they are going to be stuck developing and supporting Irix for a long time to come. I would be surprised if they could move the high end to Linux in less than 5 or 6 years.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Here it is, beginning already.
Won't we all be better off when the various Unix vendors are contributing to a shared code base? I know I will. :-)