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Feature: Myth of the Fall of SGI, Part II - the Mystery of Irix
Myth of the Fall of SGI, Part Two -
the Mystery of IRIX
When I last addressed this topic, more than a year ago, I was hoping to clarify and settle the notion of SGI's supposedly then-imminent demise. I did hope it would work.
However, there is still a peculiar occlusion perceived in SGI's future, particularly by those that do not understand what SGI does; and now, more recently, with SGI's logo change and Linux embrace, the former faithful question SGIs existence as well, possibly because of the recent layoffs (despite a strong quarter for profitability), the corporate image makeover, the MIPS stock divestiture, and the spinning off of Cray and their NT division into separate (but still quite owned) companies.
That these perceptions are still unfounded, and have been unfounded for more than a year, that SGI has posted profit recently, and that SGI continues to be a strong seller of UNIX systems despite the disappointing performance of the NT machines. Some people just can't let go of their own bad ideas. It's like the flat earthers, who continue to insist the earth is not round: I expect to run into people who will continue to insist SGI is going out of business any day now for the next ten years and beyond.
I have, at last, accepted this: that I cannot change everyone's mind with reason or facts. But you can get some of them here.
Common Mistakes and Misinformation That doesn't mean I have to let the FUD slide. Therefore, I have a list of common errors and mistakes people make when discussing SGI.
1. SGI tried to convert customers to Windows NT (or Linux).
This is obviously false, as even the most casual visit to their website shows. OSes supported by SGI are UNICOS (Cray), IRIX (MIPS), Linux (IA32/64), and Windows NT (Visual Workstation).
I find it interesting that anytime SGI adds an OS to its roster of supported platforms (UNICOS, IRIX, Linux, and NT), people assume everything will be rolled over into that one at an unspecified date. This is simply not going to happen. IRIX will remain on their MIPS-based desktop workstations, and it will continue to be upgraded as the best technical high-end UNIX out there.
2. SGI has a gloomy future. (SGI is dying, losing all its customers &c.)
This one's my favorite, simply because it can't be proved or disproved. There's no best response to this one, because it's primarily FUD, since asking for proof is generally ignored.
3. IRIX is being abandoned.
Again, another falsehood. SGI never claimed this, and SGI's IRIX support has actually remained unchanged. The only possible difference is looking like IRIX might not make it to Merced after all. Big deal. I have little faith that porting Solaris to Merced, for example, will do much to Solaris's overall market share.
3a. IRIX is unstable/insecure/unreliable.
I don't think these sorts of comments are relevant. ANY UNIX can be unstable, insecure, and unreliable, so why should IRIX be any different? Competently administered, IRIX is an extremely stable, secure, and reliable UNIX. People seem to forget we still do need people behind the console to keep things working smoothly, and a great deal depends on how well that person knows his or her system and how good she or he is with it.
Like any UNIX, IRIX isn't idiot-proof. Nor is it meant to be; most UNIX operating systems aren't meant to be run by even incredibly smart NASA monkeys, but by competent professionals.
4. Adopting Linux is the sign of a dying, desperate company.
Really? Red Hat must beg to differ. As must, to some extent, IBM, Caldera, Penguin Computing, VA Linux Systems, and indeed any business that has adopted Linux in one form or another as a part of its operating model.
5. SGI's graphics performance isn't cost effective compared with gaming cards for PCs.
I have to raise this issue. Tim Sweeny of Unreal (www.unreal.com) made comments in early July about the future of SGI, and how it doesn't stand a chance against gaming PCs. This is absolutely laughable, and Sweeny ought to have known better than make such statements.
Quoth he on his website: Now, a $2000 Pentium III PC with a Voodoo3 or TNT2 card eclipses the performance of a $30,000 SGI for real-time rendering. The CPU is faster, the fill rate is faster. When I first saw an SGI Reality Engine, my impression was, "Holy cow, I can't believe how much better this is than my '286!" But nowadays, the best 3D games look far cooler than anything you see running on a Reality Engine. When I first read that paragraph, I wondered how a veteran of the game authoring industry could make such a carelessly crafted statement without thinking about it. First, nobody buys an SGI Crimson or Onyx for gaming. Never have, never will. Second, nobody makes games for the SGI--people create games *on* the SGI, not for it, because there would be no point in doing so. Third, I'm nonplussed by the notion of any company in the computer industry has to make as many workstations as Dell makes PCs to stay in business, when the last ten years have shown that you can, and most do.
PCs that have OpenGL cards used primarily for gaming are good a small numbers of polygons, and fast pixel-fill rates. Even on the PC, cards good at large-poly-count geometry transformations tend to suck at pixel-fill (2d) operations (check out any decent card for the PC manufactured by Evans and Sutherland if you dispute this). Why this is even confused with SGI's machines is beyond me, since no PC has even been able to match the aging Reality Engine gfx first made available on the original Onyx in 1994, much less the 88 million polys/second (shaded, textured, and antialiased) of the Infinite Reality on the Onyx, introduced two years later.
But, to the lower end. If you're playing games, you're not buying an SGI. If you're creating them, you're probably not buying an SGI, unless you want to create something along the lines of Myst or Riven, the latter of which was generated on SGI machines running Softimage. But, I have noticed SGI usage popping up in more realtime-oriented titles like Spyro the Dragon (my favorite; from Insomniac Games, check 'em out) for modeling.
Most consumer gaming cards are better than all but the highest-end SGI systems for pixel fill rate. But that's all. The instant anyone needs to transform, rotate, or scale more than a few thousand polygons per second while working with unoptimised geometry (for example, during modeling), any modern SGI will beat any consumer card, period.
Just looking at the behind-the-scenes creation of any major motion picture that involved special effects to any degree reveals that SGI is still the first fallback. Why? Probably because that's where the workstation grew up: in high-demand production environments like ILM, Boss Film Studios, Pixar, and Disney (to say nothing of NASA and other supercomputing institutions nearly everywhere). 6. SGI's new logo is just another example of how SGI is dying.
This one is purely subjective. It's based purely on the espouser's opinion, which I contend is largely useless as a legitimate means of examining a corporation's health.. SGI changing its name to SGI was probably a good move, and I like the new logo only somewhat less than the old one.
To be honest, though, I don't care what the silly thing looks like. I don't see the logo as having much impact on the speed of the systems themselves, the stability of the OS, or the price of tea in China.
This sort of comment reminds me of the people who used to post flames to Usenet about how lame Apple was because they had a fruit for a logo. Yeah. Right.
What's Up Next?
SGI is headed in a different direction than any other UNIX hardware vendor thus far: SGI has actually embraced Linux and promised significant enhancements, enhancements that may actually bring Linux into the realm of viability for some of us.
IRIX is a rock-solid OS, and I cannot imagine using Linux on a production workstation at this point. But, should some fatherly organization pick Linux up, clean it up, and ensure the interface is one I'm familiar with (ksh and Indigo Magic), and applications suddenly find themselves ported to it, I don't see how it would make much of a difference if I don't notice a performance drop.
Obviously, this will take time. Unlike SGI's impending death any second now (two years and still counting, waiting for the big shoe to drop at any moment), it takes time to truly polish an OS and bring it in line with a production effort. My business is 3D graphics. I work with huge files, huge scenes, and immense amounts of data. The aplomb that an SGI running IRIX demonstrates on my workload is unmatched by any other platform or OS, so much so that I have declined purchasing 'faster' PCs and Macintoshes in favor of Indys and Indigos, simply because the responsiveness wasn't there on the PC/Mac hardware with my typical workload tests.
But if Linux can be brought in line on the low-end on SGI hardware with a comparable SGI running IRIX today, and the only real way of telling the difference is to run uname -a at the prompt, who will care?
Certainly not me, or my work.
Yo. The link to the older story doesn't work.
The author dismisses out of hand many key criticisms of SGI that are quite valid.
The notion that SGI is "going out of business" is certainly valid - the company has dropped key divisions and has laid off employees. Added to which, the best people left long ago.
Yet the author just dismisses it offhand as "FUD".
I really can't believe that even the /. crowd would fall for such a ridiculous pulp piece.
This isn't flamebait - there is a reason why people pay Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs to do intelligent research. What you see above sure ain't it.
Most of it seemed fine and dandy. But he's apparently not a sysadmin. "Secure and stable" mean diffirent things to end users and sysadmins... Although I still wouldnt mind ebaying myself an Indy2 to play with 3d stuff
Hope this helps.
--
Xenu loves you!
I had a meeting with a high level marketting person from SGI yesterday, and he said their plans were to phase out IRIX for Linux to the level that they could, and that IRIX had development plans until 2003.
I distinctly remember the CEO or President of SGI saying that only 3 Unices would survive; two were Solaris and Linxu, the third I forget (Monterey? AIX?) but it positively was not IRIX. Now this may be the same guy who recently went to M$, or it may not be. But if it was, and that itself presages a change for the better in IRIX's future, then that quick a change for no better reason implies lack of stability at SGI.
Please, proofread your writing in the future. Several sentences are basically unintelligible except in context. Such lack only implies you were in a hurry, which doesn't help your self proclaimed debunking image.
--
Infuriate left and right
Also, their press releases seemed to indicate that they were not planning on continuing their line of MIPS systems very long, which *does* translate to dropping IRIX. Of course the truth in the remains to be seen, and is a function of what Merced does...
Then your an idiot!
IRIX is the only OS that runs on the new MIPS SGI's, and it does suck. timed looses it's place, then nfs mounts drop (which aparently includes LOCALHOST!!#@!@$##@$), then all the data is lost when doing long calculations.... Anyone noticed this newest bug?
newsgroups are more a "who knows how to fix this" fest, rather than general use help. As someone with years of UNIX experiance, I have never used an OS with this many problems, ever.
What good is a $20,000 piece of hardware that can't run more than 24 hours in a row? Excuse me for saying its shit, but that was a heck of a lot of money to pay for something that won't run overnight, so it's not a good server, won't run more than a couple days under heavy load, so it's not a good machine for calculations of building large apps, it won't...
Then there is the series of upgrades and patches, v6.5.5 out how long after the previous version? We have one guy here and 6 SGI's, and his job is suppose to be coding, but turns out he is working at least 20 hours a week updateing, patching, debugging, upgrading, .... Oh, yea, that $5000 service contract for the Indy's was well worth the money. Now we can pay someone to sit on the phone and wait on hold, only to be told, "I am not aware of that, have you read the eratta" or "Oh, yea, that occasionally happens." What kind of answer is that? Oh yea, it happens??!?!?! BULL, if the machine won't run, what the heck are they selling Support and Licences for?!?
Now, this isn't new, SGI has been going down hill for about 2-3 years. And it's not the hardware, it's IRIX. Service (on site my ass, we called called called, and they finally sent out A PART and said "oh, it won't be that hard to open up the Origin, pull out the boards to get at this, and then replace the temperature probes") SUCKS! IRIX SUCKS! The best thing SGI could do is open source IRIX and give up internal development!!
If you don't think SGI is going down hill, it's customers are unhappy, and people are loosing faith, look at thier STOCK PRICE DROPS! look at user comments on USENET!!
Sure, they posted a profit. Because they advertized thier pants off, and got a lot of new first time SGI customers. How many will be returning customers? Worse yet, how many think UNIX sucks now because of SGI and IRIX, when it's only IRIX that sucks? I suspect thier profit margin over the last 10 years has droped as well.
Man.. such awsome hardware, such crappy management... (hmm.. remindes me of Apple now that I think about it, only the OS is actually WORSE!).
How about the fact that it's like driving a coin operated car. "Headlights? Oh, deposit an extra $500 for the headlight licence, we didn't think many people would be using that, so it's not included in the base price. Breaks? Oh, deposit an extra $1200 for breaks. We think our breaks are really good and valuable now, so we didn't include that in the base price anymore either."
I've spent six months with an O2000 suffering from irreproducable bus errors, segmentation faults, crashes and CPU hang-ups. SGI has not been able to fix it. It's a level of instablity orders beyond what I ever experienced with Cray (pre-SGI) or any other UNIX.
I just went through the process of buying about $50,000 in SGI products for my company. We bought an O2100 (four processors) and an 02.
SGI is pain. Their prices start out too high, then they start hitting you up for a thousand dollars here and a thousand dollars there in software and manditory support contracts. It would be much easier to send money to SGI if they would just tell you up front what he price was. They don't even post their prices on the web, for God's sake, they have a bunch of humans who evaluate how big a potential customer you are and how much they think they can squeeze you for and then give you a custom quote. The whole process was annoying, and you felt at their mercy; we had to use SGI hardware for this project because of customer specifications, and I was worried that at any point some sales creature would decide we needed to pay an extra $10,000 for some nonsense and kill the whole thing.
Has anyone else out there bought a 02100 or an 02 with the compiler license and minimal support ? Can you post a ball park figure for what you paid ?
It didn't help that we have had great success moving to PC's using linux, and our Solaris Ultra's have always been the backbone of our computer resources, and this project actually would be much better off running on four linux boxes connected by fast ethernet than four processors with shared memory.
I believe that SGI's sales has a dinosaur company culture and methodology; I'm not buying thousands of cash registers from the good ole boys at NCR for a gas station chain in 1960, god damit.
All that said, if SGI brings some of their expertise in multi-processor systems to bear on the cheaper PC world hardware and software, that would definitely be a good thing and I could see eventually sending some money their way.
We have had this problem too, I think I might be able to pull up a log by this afternoon to post if you want to see it. Haven't fixed it yet :-( anyone that knows a solution, PLEASE let me know. I know we lost overnight numbercrunching data at least twice.
Ford and GM laid off line workers - SGI laid off engineers. When a valley company lays off engineers, its over baby.
this point. But, should some fatherly organization pick Linux up, clean it up, and ensure the interface is one I'm familiar with (ksh and Indigo Magic), and applications suddenly find themselves ported to it, I don't see how it would make much of a difference if I don't notice a performance drop."
You are crazy (FUD, flame bait). Our SGI boxen are down 5-10 times more often than our Linux servers. And a pile of people out there are using Linux in major mission-critical production environments. Yes, it can be more stable, but...
when did the author say SGI wanted to PLAY GAMES? he said exactly the opposite, that NO-ONE buys an SGI to PLAY GAMES, they buy them to make games, and to do REAL WORK.
The recent SGI announcments are reasonable and I think that their strategy is sound. The big questions is : who's left at SGI? With the 'slightly' different job market for graphics hardware designers and the strange decisions of SGI in the past few years I'm worried that they have lost most of their best engineers, and SGI is nothing without their engineers.
On another note : 88 million polys/s on IR? Where does this come from? An IR pipe does 10 million polys/s AFAIK. The big benefit is bandwidth and the fact that basically all of OpenGL is implemented in hardware (a glVertex3f call turns into 7 (!) instructions on an IR machine), offloading the CPUs to do other stuff. But SGI must do something radical to keep hold of high-end graphics, recent delays in the future graphics line does little to inspire confidence.
I believe this has to be seriously reworked in the light of the first demoes of what NVIDIA's new GeForce can do.
And what about SGI transferring its OpenGL experience to NVIDIA (in the form of engineers)? Is this the sign of a healthy company?
I mostly agree with Scott Elyard. But as a SGI user who does not work
in high-end graphics domain, I must say that:
2. SGI has a gloomy future. (SGI is dying, losing all its customers &c.)
I do believe this. In my domain (bioinformatics) which is
fast expanding, less and less people are buying SGI servers and more
and more are buying Sun's and Compaq's. If you don't do high-end
graphics, you really can get better deals elsewhere.
3. IRIX is being abandoned.
This is almost true. People who use IRIX like me get pissed off when
they try to install some new software. Look at setiathome for
instance. It was available for Win32, MacOS, Linux, SunOS. And
that's about it. It took months before an IRIX version was made. So
by merging Linux and IRIX, SGI hopes to make much more software
available on their machines.
Having said that, I am a happy SGI customer. And anyway, I am stuck
with it for a couple of years at least. Fortunately, I managed to
switch my SGI O2 for a Linux PC!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
IRIX is a rock-solid OS, and I cannot imagine using Linux on a production workstation at this point.
I have used IRIX since 1993. I have used Linux since 1997. In January of 1998, I might have agreed. As for the whole calander year of 1999, I have spent about 85% more time using Linux, and about 4% of my time using IRIX (and about 0.1% using DEC-UNIX), and about 10% of my time using FreeBSD. Of the time I spend trying to track bugs, and figure out where errors are comeing from, it's about 50/50 IRIX/Linux. Considering how little I use IRIX, that's probably more time tracking bugs than actual use.
To tell the truth, I now 4 people here who use IRIX as thier primary workstation OS, and they would opt out if they had a choice. Conclusing, I think today in 1999, I would completely dissagree with the statement "IRIX is a rock-solid OS, and I cannot imagine using Linux on a production workstation at this point."
> IRIX is a rock-solid OS, and I cannot imagine
> using Linux on a production workstation at this
> point
I can only imagine that the author of this piece has a very different definition of "production" to mine.
I had the misfortune of sysadmining an Irix network a few years back, and I must say I have never experienced such an unstable, unpredictable, bloated, inconsistant, swap-happy, disgusting, dreadful, CRAP operating system as Irix. There are only two operating systems I dislike more than NT; SCO and Irix.
Never before have I been told to "reinstall the operating system" on a UNIX box because of an application failure (namely that SGI's supplied named kept dying). Never before have I had filesystems become corrupt while actually in use - even SCO doesn't do that (and no, it wasn't hardware).
We had a Challenge set up as a web server that we used to call "Scroedinger's Server". I'm sure you can guess why.
As to workstation use, did you ever see such a slow window manager? This on machines with 128Mb RAM.
Of course, that was way back in Irix 5.3 days. The later versions manage to be even more bloated, and yet be even less functional.
You see, I am someone who gets paid real, live money to look after real, live, user-facing machines. "Bet your business" machines. They have been Solaris machines, AIX machines, Dynix machines, and yes, Linux machines. I sleep at night running these systems.
The author of this piece, I suspect is not in this position. His idea of a "stable" platform may be one where he can fit a complete render between crashes. If that's all he wants, fair enough - because that's about all he'll get from Irix.
http://reality.sgi.com/ariel/sgi-myths.html
Says it was taken down because SGI is making it's predicted comeback.
HA
As a long time SGI Customer I need resources like this more than ever. GET OFF YOUR BUT ARIEL!
I can't stop the flood. Next year we'll be joining "The Collective"
It seems pretty clear that this guy is a stockholder of SGI. Which it's generally a good idea to steer clear of corporate advocacy (you listening, Mac bigots?) - there is much potential for conflicts of interest. It's almost like I can tell who's long on SGI and who's shorting it, just by the subject line here.
What is a former employee of SGI gonna say? "Oh, all the worst people left the company...like me!"
Please.
Blar.
But a lot of what you are saying is just plain wrong. For starters the summary you link to was posted to the friends of performer mailing list by an SGI employee - and you expect objectivity from that source?
Also, you disagree that SGI's graphic solutions aren't cost-effective compared to consumer 3D boards - even SGI wouldn't risk such as statement (_they_ would realize it would make them look stupid). SGI's target market is only a tiny fraction of the consumer market in terms of the number of products sold, so there's a good reason for this.
But SGI's product is not only being superceded in terms of cost effectiveness. SGI's base reality and Infinite Reality (2) systems are not that impressive compared to the consumer boards. The Nvidia GeForce even has a higher polyrate than the single-pipe IR2, and it certainly has a very comparable fill rate (faster or slower depending on the number of raster managers).
There's nothing that drives product development as fast as the consumer market competion. SGI has faced this reality, why wont you?
What SGI has, but you fail to mention at all (perhaps because it is a _valid_ point), is slightly more features, like 3D textures and multi-sampling (for e.g. anti-aliasing).
Now, about the use of SGI worksstations for making special effects in movies. This has nothing to do with SGI hardware at all - Computer animations in movies are based on raytracing techniques, which to my knowledge are done entirely in software. Nobody is disputing that SGI has the expertise when it concerns graphics - but many are (correctly, imho) disputing that SGIs hardware will be able to stay ahead of the consumer products unless they do something radical. SGI sees the same thing and have formed a strategic alliance with the 3D consumer market leader Nvidia - SGI will built their future hardware using the same chips as consumer boards, only SGI will put them to work in parallel, like some company did with the Voodoo(2) chipset
Linux is not an alternative to SGI yet - the OpenGL hardware support is not solid enough yet, but we're getting there, partially thanks to SGI! Additionally the software isn't there yet either, but we're getting there. For instance SGI(!) is porting performer to linux!
SGI is a cool company with a _lot_ of engineering talent. They really don't need you to spread FUD - Now that the bosses have woken up and demonstrated that they do have the guts to make truly radical changes like adopting linux as a key element in their strategy, they'll make it just fine.
OK, so we're supposed to make Linux behave like IRIX, so that he feels good using it? Get lost... Not to mention the fact that Linux already has ksh (which isn't the default on IRIX, either). I really can't guess what is meant by "clean it up"...more consistant documentation, perhaps? No, when compared to IRIX, I don't think that's what he could have meant (lots more docs for Linux available). Consistant directory structure? LSB works for me...besides, all directory conventions are products of one company, and everyone disagrees. Cleaner code? Oh wait, you can't see the code for IRIX, so I guess there's no comparison there. And why would I want Linux running on low-end SGI hardware, when by next month I can buy a K7 for the same price as an Indy? I got my Multia for $80 (no RAM, HDD, monitor), and I think Indys are worth about as much, NOT $1000(even considering the cost of RAM, HDD, monitor)...an e-machine is probably more useful, at 1/2 the cost.
I think it's not pointless to worry about if SGI is going under or not. The important thing is that we can get hardware on which to run free software. Hardware is tough because it can't be duplicated for free.
:-) ). Even if I didn't have the support of all the Amiga developers out there still churning code, I'd still be good to go because I've got Linux and hardware to run it on.
I've got an Amiga which runs both Amiga OS and Linux (Linux on 25MHz '040: anything you can do, I can do slower! Don't think I won't put the smack down with the 16MHz '030, either.
The SGI owners are even better off. SGI has made some serious open-source contributions. What's to stop them from doing more? They could give Linux the power to take advantage of the SGI hardware like IRIX does.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it's not important if we lose the ability to choose IRIX if a suitable replacement is available, but it would be bad to lose a platform with such a particular strength (graphics). OTOH, if we *did* lose SGI, the machines already out there would still be supported.
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
dzien dobry!
Where did this guy get his numbers from when taking about the cost-effectiveness of an SGI compared to a PC?
"no PC has even been able to match the aging Reality Engine gfx first made available on the original Onyx in 1994, much less the 88 million polys/second (shaded, textured, and antialiased) of the Infinite Reality on the Onyx, introduced two years later."
The Onyx2 Infinite Reality 2 is rated at 13 million polygons per second (http://www.sgi.com/onyx2/sys_hardware.html).
Nvidia's NV10 (now called the GeForce 256) is quoted at 15 million triangles per second (http://www.3dgpu.com/chip/index.cfm).
I've being involved in graphics long enough to take these numbers with a pinch of salt. But, both camps use the same tricks when making up the numbers and they suffice as an *approximate* measure of relative performance.
Granted, the Oynx2 has a full OpenGL hardware implementation and nice bus speeds. However, most OpenGL programmers dont need a *full* OpenGL implementation, the GeForce 256 covers the needs of most users, namely hardware accelerated geometry transformation, lighting, triangle setup and rasterization.
As for "cost effectiveness", the original point in the article, a Oynx2 is yours for several hundred thousand dollars. Several hundred dollars (will) buy you a GeForce 256.
A 450MHx PII with a VoodooII card currently beats my O2 on graphics performance and costs a fraction of the price.
IRIX is insecure! Any system which ships with unpassworded accounts is NOT SECURE! Not to mention the "holey" cgi-scripts.
No need to post the log, I am quite happy to take your word for it. I was just saying that not all IRIX machines crash out all the time.
:)
And if nothing else, they do have funky boxes
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
anonymous cowards rulz!
moderators, how come you stopped?
I've administered SGI boxes (as well as Sun boxes, Linux boxes, and NT boxes) for a few years now, and am currently working as the Sr. Sys Admin for a 3D house, so I've actually got some experience with most of the comments.
As far as stable goes - well, I managed to build and administer SGI boxes that stayed up for months at a time (probably longer except for maintenance) even while handling large loads and doing lots of stuff - but we were using them as webservers. Maybe that makes a difference - but they were still getting hammered. They aren't as stable as some boxes, and there are some issues, but IF you know what you're doing they work just fine.
As far as fast and powerful? Well, they can be pretty damn fast and pretty powerful, but frankly they just can't compare, dollar to dollar, with x86 boxes. As webservers, a P2-550 running Linux will blow away most SGI boxes, and certainly any that you can get for under $20K. As rendering boxes, an $8K Intergraph workstation (while I hate them with a passion and consider them the biggest POS boxes I've worked with - including generic x86 clones) can outperform a $15K or $20K SGI Octane when working with Softimage.
I hate NT and hate Intergraph but I have to admit it makes sense in a lot of ways to move from SGI's to Intergraphs - more software (Photoshop 5, Aftereffects, etc.) and more speed, for half the price. They're buggy as hell, they crash, they're a pain to administer - but the CG users love 'em.
If I had my way we'd go solid SGI and screw the price and screw the apps - but I'm not the one making the decisions, and the CG department has decided consistently to go with Intergraphs. Within a year we probably won't have any SGI's left over, except maybe the pair of Octanes we got when we got the first batch of Intergraphs. It's sad, but true - SGI is being beaten at their own (old) game - 3D graphics.
> Really? Red Hat must beg to differ. As must, to > some extent, IBM, Caldera, Penguin Computing,
> VA Linux Systems...
The question, more correctly phrased would be "an established company which de-emphasises its existing products in some degree to embrace Linux is a sign...". Not a hard and fast rule, but generally true. (This throws out the Linux pure-play companies.)
The author says that SGI is stable, rock-solid, but offers no evidence. He then dismisses people who say SGI as unstable as spreading FUD. Well, making blanket statements with no evidence is FUD (or reverse FUD).
Nothing against SGI, but this is a really dumb article. Layoffs and restructuring do warrant concern about the future of a company. Saying that people who are concerned about SGI's future are spreading FUD is stupid.
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Stephen Molitor steve_molitor@yahoo.com
What's wrong with ksh for Linux?
Stephen Molitor steve_molitor@yahoo.com
This is an interesting discussion.
Yesterday I was talking with our VP of engineering who came from SGI (where I think he worked on the IRIX OS). He had several interesting comments about SGI.
1. Most of the operating system engineers who worked on IRIX have left. SGI is turning to Linux out of desparation since so many of the people who are knowlegable about the internal workings of IRIX are gone. Apparently SGI's deal with Micro$oft did not go over well with their development team.
2. XFS will be a nightmare to make stable for Linux. XFS is not a clean file system like JFS, but contains a horrendous amount of complexity (read bloat), such as lots of multimedia support, special scheduling code, and so forth. It will be hard to separate the bloat from the core of the file system. Due to its complexity it will be very difficult to understand and make stable. It is likely that SGI is releasing it as open source since they don't know what else to do with it since all of the original developers left.
3. SGI's deal with Microsoft was a huge mistake. Any company that teams with Microsoft is doomed to failure. Microsoft used the deal to essentially kill OpenGL as a valid 3-D platform for Windows and replaced it with Direct-3D.
4. SGI's acquisition of Cray was a huge mistake. The folks at Cray and the Mips division clashed and essentially killed Mips. The Cray folks pushed for vector processing in the Mips processor, which was not a good match. The Mips people argued against this. The Cray team won. The reason is that Cray's bread and butter is their SIMD vector processing. Without it, Cray is nothing. The vector processing conflicted with the whole idea behind RISC, which is to keep things simple. Guess what happened to Mips?
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
As for secure, all you need to do is search the bugtraq archives from '97 and '98 -- nearly every setuid 0 binary had a root-giving exploit for it. I'll agree that any OS can be insecure, sure, but, Christ, IRIX was *really fucking bad* a year or so ago. To its credit, it hasn't appeared much recently on bugtraq/rootshell/etc, so maybe things have finally turned around.
4Dwm still sucks, though.
- A.P. (running WMaker on this IP22)
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
>Now, about the use of SGI worksstations for >making special effects in movies. This has nothing >to do with SGI hardware at
> all - Computer animations in >movies are based on raytracing techniques, which >to my knowledge are done entirely in
> software.
Wrong! Many movies are composited (ie the different layers of the animation are added together) on software such Discreet's Inferno system. This runs on
an Onyx2 IR and renders final frames using the OpenGL graphics pipeline. ILM uses it in house but calls it Sabre. Check out www.discreet.com for info. In this market SGI has NO competition, if they ain't using discreet they're using Kodak Cineon or Avid Illusion or Jaleo or Chalice, but they all run on SGI hardware. (yes there is NT compositing solutions but not at the high end).
Also in 3d modeling, sure you render the final frames using software only but during modelling you need a good opengl pipeline so you can see your 50,000 poly texture heavy model at a decent speed to make changes. Try running Maya or Softimage on your TNT or Voodoo 2, what's that, won't run? Funny that.... (Games 3D cards not equal good professional 3d card)
(a visual fx operator and everyday sgi user)
My experience might well be an anomaly, though.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
A good article in some respects but I have a few doubts. SGI is undoubtedly a great company and we owe them a lot, correct me if i'm wrong but didn't they create the OpenGL standard? I think they missed some good oportunities however. Direct3D never had to exist, it did because ther was a hole in the market and it did need to be filled, no-one else was doing that. If SGI had entered the 3D gaming consumer cards market early enough, who would have dared to follow? When it comes to graphics technology they're still light years ahead. There is a big but to all this, the point about PC graphics card fill rates was correct and yes PCs do need geometry pipelines to even begin to compete, but what about nvidias geforce 256 for example. Complete goemetry and lighting in hardware. Now all PC 3D card makers will have to follow suit. The gap looks slightly smaller now. I wish SGI all the success, but the pace of progress is frightening. Just some thoughts
No one mentioned the fact that SGI's arch is unified graphics/cpu memory. I believ SGI's are designed in a way that reduce processor wait states with a special chip similar to the www.phase5.de A-Box?)
:)
Take a look: http://www.sgi.com/o2/uma.html
Unified Memory makes things like page flipping extremely smooth. One of the reasons my 25MHz Amiga 4000 can do things my P200MMX still can't
PC Games and the like are the primary engines for the incredible growth of 3d accelerator cards for this once humble platform. The level of performance that the upcoming generation is promising (the savage2000 [conservatively] promises over 700M texels/s!!; the T&L unit on the GeForce256 is quite incredible; who-knows (cares ;) about 3dfx) is quite mind-blowing. It might not be an Indy, but it costs a lot less and that, IMO, is good. Unfortunately the market for megabucks gfx workstations is a niche that is closing. Gamers with plenty $$ what that eye-candy on their PCs - where does that leave sgi? Thats why linux is a good move, get out of the commodity OS/Hardware game - leverage NVidia to support linux - which will mean that those fruits will spill to the wider community. sgi must concentrate on producing high-quality gfx software/ui's on commodity platforms. Play actively in the consumer space.
This is one of the funnier lines in the article, since it so clearly applies to the writer rather than the folks he disagrees with.
In a couple of places, he refers to SGI being profitable. According to the SEC, SGI hasn't posted an annual profit in years. In the latest quarterly report, they posted another huge loss. They have 'announced' a $22 million profit for the latest quarter, but I'll reserve judgement until the 10Q is filed.
They are on their third CEO in three years.
They are on their third 'strategy' in three years.
They are selling off their NT and Cray divisions. The last time they did this, they sold the "Business Systems Division" piece of Cray to Sun for a pittance. Sun used that division to create the Starfire (actually, it was almost finished at SGI), which has already sold more than 1500 units, for a total of (guessing) more than $1.5 billion.
Not only are they losing money every quarter, their top line (ie, sales) have been shrinking for three years.
The value of their stock has dropped by about 50% in the last 9 months.
They just laid off more than 15% of their workforce.
How much do you need before acknowledging that a once-great company is in real trouble?
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
First gripe, SGI announced to their stockholders and the world that they are as a company, intending to narrow their scope. Currently, they are drawn thin financially and intellectually. There is no hope that they'll be able to deliver quality products to the market unless they narrow.
Along this line, they intend to push Linux to the forefront. Which may or may not be a mistake. It has some qualities that IRIX will never be able to match. 1) Linux is portable! 2) Linux has a well-managed and stable development path 3) Linux is a media darling.
IRIX won't ever manage any of these points because the company has been posting losses for two solid years. I couldn't care less if they have a profitable quarter, the company is losing money each fiscal year! And they're chasing their tail trying to find a way to stop it.
First they jumped from the workstation Bandwagon to the Supercomputer bandwagon right when supercomputers went out of fashion. Then they jumped from the Unix workstation to the WinNT workstation right when it was no longer profitable to sell Intel Workstations! Now they're jumping trains again and are supposed to have credibility. Then only advantage this time around is that SGI will be releasing so much of their old intellectual property into the Linux domain that they won't be able to jump train again.
As for the Big Iron behind movies, Pixar is running completely off of Sun E4500 with 4 Elite 3d M6's each. Titanic rendered on Linux. SGI doesn't have an advantage in this market any longer. HP's newest rendering cards could bring even more competition into this really limited niche.
There was enough comments about how unstable the newer versions of IRIX are. SGI (just like Cray) made a trade-off for performance over stability. This has made IRIX 6.5 even unsuitable for many HPC environments! My first introduction to IRIX 6.5 was about 9 months ago. It was a fully patched system running a beautiful screen saver. I was waiting to be awed by some amazing 3d software. The person providing the demonstration shook the mouse and the screensaver froze. The entire system hung. It didn't respond to ping or console. No wonder no one uses this as a server!
If you want to believe SGI is healthy and solid for the long-term, go ahead. I won't berate you your religion. But those without faith in any computer company have to wonder how much lower the stock will dip before someone buys SGI forthright. Or how many more years they can post losses and continue to breath.
Regards,
Andrew Garman
Before SGI, Evans & Sutherland was the premier graphics hardware company. For some reason E&S did not transition to the new-fangled workstation market (@1980) and retreated into a niche player of high-performance graphics workstation boards. SGI is having the same problem of transitioning into the high-end PC market and may eventually be a niche player.
Only one of these can be true folks!
Also have heard a lot of people testify about IRIX that seem to have never used it.
Come on people, don't comment if you can't provide some concrete data.
If IRIX does not make it to IA-64 then it is dead. SGI has already dropped development of its MIPS compiler, shifting the entire compiler group over to teh IA-64 (except for a few bug fixes for MIPS). They are quite simply, going all out for IA-64/Linux. Also, they may decide to user egcs as a front end and release a highly-optimized backend compiler, which enventually (1-2 years) would be open sourced.
Fact: Oracle is at least 1 release behind on SGI platforms. Why? Simple...no requests. Fact: Boss Film studios has been out of biz for a while now. Why? They were SGI only and costs could not be controlled. Fact: The last 3 CEO's have all been fired. Why? Cause they were idiots. Fact: SGI has had more layoffs than any other unix vendor since. Why? Don't need talent when you don't have anyone to sell stuff to. Fact: Not one new CAD program has been released for IRIX since 1997. They have all gone NT or Solaris or AIX. Even those that are on IRIX right now are (on average) 2 releases behind their NT counterparts. Why? Nobody to sell to...all the SGI owners have gone NT or Solaris. Fact: SGI has no plans to continue development of IRIX beyond 2003. Why? Cause all the talented folks have hit the road.
Just for the record. Many in both the high end and low end of the entertainment industry are switching over to affordable networked PCs setup as renderfarms. 3D animation programs like Animation Master Network version and LightWave have built in support for this. A 20 to 60 pc renderfarm (made up of PIIs and PIIIs) is usually cheaper and faster than an Onyx. More importantly, if one of those PCs goes down, all the rest can still perform while you get it replaced.
Both the above mentioned programs can also do this with MACs.
SGI will not be on the road to recovery until they dump the evil, stupid new logo.
The new logo is just Belluzzo's way to add insult to injury after his evil tenure at SGI, before crawling back to whence he spawned, Microsoft.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
What are your predictions? Frankly, I don't see how they'll be able to make money shipping Intel based machines with a free OS. They'll be competing with the whole goddamn industry.
Actually they get paid about the same. Line workers can earn a ton of money, some even six figures.
You said (quoting him, and adding your own comments):
"no PC has even been able to match the aging Reality Engine gfx first made available on the original Onyx in 1994, much less the 88 million polys/second (shaded,
textured, and antialiased) of the Infinite Reality on the Onyx, introduced two years later."
The Onyx2 Infinite Reality 2 is rated at 13 million polygons per second (http://www.sgi.com/onyx2/sys_hardware.html).
Nvidia's NV10 (now called the GeForce 256) is quoted at 15 million triangles per second (http://www.3dgpu.com/chip/index.cfm).
Now, I'll be the first to say that I've had experience with neither card/PC/whatever, nor will I anytime soon, most likely, but I just wanted to point out something and attempt to ascertain whether or not you were correct in making your claim about the Nvidia NV10. You said "triangles," which I don't consider polygons, and I never really thought anyone else did either. Now, I realize that this may not matter, because I'm guessing the NV10's performance with polygons matches that of its performance with triangles, but I just wanted to point out that [apparent, to me at least] error in your argument against the Onyx2 Infinite Reality 2 and in favor of the NV10. That said, I haven't quite figure out which side to believe: the pro-SGI camp or the con-SGI camp, although I'm wondering if I'd just go a bit more with the con-SGI camp, because I'm thinking that, if they were _that_ good, they'd be more prevelant.
That said, thank you.
Insert mind here.
But, GCC is no where near as good a compiler is MIPS Pro 7.3 for thier hardware.
REACT? XFS? grio? processor affinity? video library signal delay awareness? real-time texture paging support? inst/swmgr? BSD/System V/POSIX/XOPEN/XPG4 conformance? dynamic mapping of pthreads to sprocs? ... Feel free to look elsewhere if all you need is commodity networking stuff.
There's things you just can't do with anything else than an IR. It's not just who pushes polygons faster. Even then, where's the hardware/software combination allowing you to combine several GeForces together for s single display? Not to mention that comparing a chip that just went out with a machine that is over 2 years old is not fair. Don't worry. SGI will start using piles of commodity NVIDIA chips for implementing high end stuff.
Dude, are you such a blind fan that you refuse to look at this objectively?
:)
A company adopting Linux is usually a good thing. I like the fact that SGI has done this - they're great Linux supporters, and I wish them all the success in the world.
I like SGI as a company too. I still remember the days that I'd drool over their servers & workstations.
However, I am DISAPPOINTED with SGI as a company. They have failed to market their innovative products, they have failed to attract new followers. They are in -maintenance mode-, not -growth mode-. That's a bad sign.
Adopting Linux, though objectively a great move, is also a dangerous and somewhat embarrasing move. This is a company that has already passed through a bandwagon with Windows NT. Now they're jumping onto another one.
There is a *pattern* of failing companies adopting a bandwagon technology and taking the stance that "XXX will save us!". Intergraph did this with Windows NT - and it worked - for a while. They're losing LESS money, but they're still losing money
Amiga Inc. has tried for years to re-release the Amiga. QNX couldn't help it (even though it is a gorgeously designed OS), but now supposedly Linux (and every other industry buzz word: Jini, Java, etc.) can.
Corel has done this FOUR TIMES now - first with Windows 95, then with WordPerfect, then with Java, now with Linux. Each time they got burned, and Michael Cowpland got bitter. That man sure has balls, but I really hope he hits a home run soon, because it ain't going to do Linux any good if he fails, and it ain't going to help the Canadian technology industry.
All of these technologies are GREAT technologies (yes, even Java). But using them to SAVE YOUR COMPANY is a fool's journey. A solid business theory combined with a model to implement that theory is what works. Technology for technology's sake doesn't make profits, and an unprofitable company does very little to help our society in the long run.
So please, understand my position. SGI jumping on Linux doesn't seem like a re-invigorated company looking to impress us - it looks like a tired & frightened company, drowning in raging rapids, looking to hold onto the last branch before the waterfall. Surely this is exagerrated (their financials aren't THAT bad), but perception rarely reflects reality. Deal with it.
-Stu
At the risk of sounding lame, "me too".
For my Masters thesis, I am writing code in C++, using STL and Qt. The code takes about a minute to compile and link on the university's Indy workstations. However, I was surprised to find that on my 133MHz Pentium laptop, it makes in seconds.
Given that it doesn't use anything IRIX-specific, I've pretty much switched all development over to Linux, using the Indys mostly to access email and the web and print stuff.
-- acb [being able to code whilst on the bus is another advantage of having a laptop...]
...not to mention the gaping hole cut in X authentication, no doubt to install some cool-looking graphics and impress some Hollywood suit.
Everyone close to SGI knows that they have been overweight for years. The MIPS merger was OK, but Cray's took the head count to 10K. It was very unfortunate to have so many of the most talented people leaving, but on the other hand, this felt as a step in the right direction. The current layoffs only mean they are now motivated not to waste so much money, not that they have to shrink their activities. And I guess that's how Bishop could end up CEO. Don't look for charisma there. But if you need a slayer, he's the one.
While SGI may have no peers in certain specialised market niches, I would humbly suggest that it come to the realities of the marketplace in pricing third party peripherals and knic-knac add-ons. Doing head-head comparisons of features, I would quite happily pay a premium for SGI functions that are truely unique and truely add productive value to work. However, as a budget concious customer, I would be royally pissed off at the massive markups on bundled 3rd party goods (admittedly it has gotten better in recent years) with limited choice (try getting Irix drivers for exotic hardware). As hardware and software becomes a commodity, the power of choice shifts to the buyer. People who purchase SGI goods are not idiots, but how long will loyalty last when they find out that adding the SGI name to a rebadged product adds significantly to the cost (and this goes to any branded vs white box hardware)? SGI does have a lot of technical brilliance in its favor and it could become a rebound story a la Apple with its adoption of Linux. However, they really need to have some clarity of thought as to the value they are offering compared with their competition and provide efficient execution in an era of faster business cycles. Promises are nice but delivery is what counts.
LL
This has got to be one of the worst responses to FUD I've ever heard in my life. He doesn't even try to argue with "facts and figures" as he claims -- just laying down blanket statements that are provably ridiculous.
I'll respond to each of his 5 points.
1. SGI tried to convert customers to Windows NT (or Linux).
The point isn't that SGI was trying to convert people to NT, but in order to take market share back from Intergraph, who was beating their pants off in terms of price/performance.
2. SGI has a gloomy future. (SGI is dying, losing all its customers &c.)
Who are the engineers working for 3dfx and NVIDIA now? Ex SGI employees. Plus, they've been going through massive layoffs and are talking about spinning off Cray whom they just acquired.
3. IRIX is being abandoned.
You're right, its not. But at the same time it hasn't had any new advancements in the last 5 years except 64 bit support.
3a. IRIX is unstable/insecure/unreliable.
You are also correct here that security depends on competent sysadmins, not the *NIX itself. Of course, that's why when we let SGI configure our new O2 they forgot to install ALL of the security patches and thus had our network compromised.
4. Adopting Linux is the sign of a dying, desperate company.
No, I think its more of a "ooh, we can get software without paying for engineers that we can't afford" sort of thing.
5. SGI's graphics performance isn't cost effective compared with gaming cards for PCs.
You say that SGIs have never been used for gaming. Never will. Fooey.
I was working for an arcade games company that used Onyxes to do power location based entertainment (LBE) software. I personally know of
two or three other companies that used SGIs for the same purpose.
Then on top of that you have the whole military simulation industry, which vaguely fits into the category of games (at least we used them as such during lunch breaks).
Entertainment is one of the major goals of SGIs. Don't use blanket statements to dismiss it.
-Shaka
I am not hip on the Irix side, so it could suck like a black hole for all I know- but on the hardware side they are betting on Nvidia, IA64, and Linux. It looks like a damn good bet to me.
Irix is being dropped from the OS offerings, no matter what this guy thinks.
The letter was sent to investors about the decision.
You didn't exactly have correct spelling and grammar in your post either, how about "Linxu"? A comma dosen't belong after "Please" in the second paragraph. Of course, the spelling and grammar of most slashdotters reflects the poor content to begin with and I wonder why I'm even wasting my time to reply to this...
What hasn't been really brought out is that SGI's problems come from gross mismanagement at the mid and upper levels of the company.
I worked at SGI as a contractor a few years back, and then, they had lots of smart engineers, but no effective communication or strategization of what they were trying to accomplish as a company (except maybe "we want to do K00L stuff!"). Surprisingly enough, I also didn't see any real evidence of a QA process for IRIX (which explains how lousy IRIX is from a stability point of view).
The situation is worse now, because the smart engineers read the writing on the wall, and bailed. And management types who are good and have hot prospects are not going to sign up with a company in as bad shape at SGI.
SGI is the walking dead. All this talk of their technology misses the vital point that you can't operate a large company like SGI without effective management (no matter how cool the technology).
I know people who are very sharp and have left SGI, in their opinion, the best people have already left SGI. The ones who are left either are part of the problem, or else are busy looking for new jobs.
And SGI can't hire good new people because good people don't want to work with the walking dead.
Someone will buy them, to acquire some of the cool hardware technology - but nobody wants IRIX (not even SGI).
Benchmark Results: Integraph is faster, more stable and gives more bang for the buck. And that's the bottom line because Stone Cold said so!
czesc ;-)
As an ex third party developer for SGI, and as
an ex SGI employee, I just have to comment on this. What most people miss when talking about SGI is (quite apart from market forces), the extent that they have done damage to themselves over the years.
As a third party software developer:
The following was a typical encounter with SGI:
- SGI would come to town to talk about the plans for new desktop machine XXX. They would happily present how it would do a bunch of neato things like stream video or texture map with color cubes.
- We would tell them that what was REALLY needed was faster line drawing in 3D, and in color mapped mode. The other stuff sounds neat, but is pretty useless commercially.
- They would tell us that what we were asking for was too boring. Not sexy enough.
- We would tell them that it was what customers NEEDED. Otherwise the PC's would catch up.
- They would ignore us.
My favourite instance of this was the Indigo 2 Impact. It supported lots of new features, but in some cases was actually SLOWER doing the operations performed by ALL 3D packages 90% of the time (3D lines in color mapped mode).
Guess what happened? The PC caught up.
From a customer perspective:
SGI was the only game in town for 10 years. The sales force new this, and treated customers with disdain. How SGI was screwing you was a pretty typical topic of conversation around the graphics watercoolers. Waiting 2 months for replacement parts is a good example. Funny how the loan company would never wait 2 months for payment on the machines.
Finally, as an ExSGI employee:
All I can say is that 95% of the talent has left the company. Once the ship starts sinking in the Valley, the rats leave really quickly. Most SGI'ers are happily working at internet startups and graphics startups. Few good ones remain.
It's all very sad.
Well allI have to say is 'Bravo'! I have administered SGI systems from Personal IRIX running IRIX 4.0.5 to Origin2000 sytems running IRIX 6.5. And they can be some of the flakiest and some of the most stable systems I have worked with. I love SGI technology,hardware and software. There marketing department is another deal....I have worked with other Unix systems extensively and have found IRIX to be my favorite OS. Even more than Linux (GASP!) Though they are not without their faults. But I felt very comfortable running large scale production systems on Origin2000 and Challenge XL computers and I would sleep like a baby and don't recall ever getting woken up in the middle of the night do to a server crash. I ust hope that SGI on the business side can get their act together! I couldn't imagine a world without SGI... cjs@cinenet.net p.s. Boss Films went out of business about a year and a half ago...I used to work there ;-)
There is usually nothing wrong with a workstation having security holes you can drive a truck through. If your firewall is doing its job, then the security threat should never reach IRIX. IRIX is great for what it was designed to do, graphics. Optimizations in IRIX to meet those ends kind of goes against the UNIX philosphoy for rock solid and air-tight. But worrying about security features, and 300 day uptimes, would not meet the needs of the OS. Having stability or speed comes at the price of the other. IE. You can make it really fast if you don't care if it crashes every few minutes.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Is it just me, or do all the sysadmins on /. seem to have a superiority complex? What do you call someon who is more happy with a computer would rather have 10X more stable, than 10X more powerful? A sysadmin.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
IRIX has just about the most suid root programs of any other UNIX around. Time and time again there are vulnerabilities found in some suid root program (usually related to their overengineered GUI). They reportedly hired a person at least a year ago specifically to audit all the code and eliminate buffer overruns. However, new and old buffer overruns are still discovered at a fairly steady rate.
Of course if you use IRIX as a server OS and remove/disable all the desktop setuid stuff as well as turn off all the network services you don't use, then IRIX is almost as secure as the next UNIX. However the point is not to compare one highly-tightened down UNIX against the next highly-tightened down UNIX. The point of rating security of a given OS is how secure is that OS out of the box.
If you make an apples-to-apples comparison of IRIX against some of the OS's specifically designed to be secure (OpenBSD, etc), then IRIX fails utterly.
--Dave
Man you're a jackass. Think about what you just said.
Once again - the opinions here are my own and this is not to be considered an official SGI position.
-- Forest
fgodfrey@bigw.org
If you look at Dell's numbers, I'd hazard to guess there is more money in making systems to play games, then making systems to make games. SGI has failed in increasing their potential market while loosing ground on the low end. I honestly am not an SGI user, but when I was at university a couple years back, the CS department decided to give SGI a try bought a couple Indys, Indigos, and we tested an O2. These machines while looking cool and and running fast were generally unrealiable. They needed to be rebooted (out of virtual memory), and crashed frequently. Since then the department has gone nearly 100% SPARC/Solaris. About that same time, while working in Silicon Valley, I heard rumors about how Irix was a total mess, and anyone in engineering could patch the system code at any time which made for a maintainence nightmare. Then a memo was leaked from SGI to the net about the poor state of Irix. Yea you could say that this is a small sample, but it generally left a bad taste in my mouth about SGI's low to mid range workstations, and I doubt I am the only one.
Does anyone know of a port of the "flight" [simulator] program to use X on non-SGI hardware? That would be cool.
Ummm, I'm pretty sure that SGI peddles IRIX servers and is drooling Sun's network market. The ultra high-end workstation market can not support a company the size of SGI.
While I am absolutely sure that you know more about what SGI is planning than I the outside observer, but I worked on a project for a rather large, yet struggling company, where I heard the VP of Engineering himself tell us we had his 100% support for the foreseeable future. The product team went on to develop a 1 year plan for the project. Well unfortunately the VP could only see about 2 months into the future. Our technology and division was hacked off and traded to a two bit start-up. Point being. Plans change, and rank and file engineers are sometimes the last to know.
I was not complaining about bad spelling or typoes, I was complaining about the shoddy sentence structure which renders entire sentences into meaningless gibberish.
--
Infuriate left and right
The only problem I have withh running Linux on a PC is the PC. IBM compatibles have crap leftover from the f'n AT! It's stupid. The visual workstations are the way to go, even if SGI screws that up too. Intel systems are fine except for all of the stuff they have to put in so you can run DOS. Hopefully more system deigners will start acutally using Linux for more than just avoiding the redmond tax. Wouldn't it be cool if you could buy an Athalon system that was completely modern, used commodity parts, and was completely optimized for Linux or *BSD? The NUMA concepts that went into the visPC's are vastly superior to any PC system or Mac. I hope that the best peices of the unix world can be commoditized into the PC market.
I'm an ex-SGI employee, hence the "Anonymous Coward" post. But that said, I can't claim to having a huge amount of inside information... this is just the kind of stuff you would here employees complaining about in places like the internal newsgroup sgi.bad-attitude (which can make the slashdot "RedHat=Microsoft" posts look optimistic).
There are incessant complaints inside SGI that the company seems to be incapable of marketing. It just builds stuff and expects people to find out about it somehow and come and get it. There are complaints about the company constantly coming up with neat Cool Ideas, and then dropping them, to the point that that no ISV is willing to listen to the next Cool Idea. And there are incessant complaints about poor management (e.g. don't believe anyone who says that SGI has decided to abandon Irix... SGI never makes a decision about anything).
I can state with confidence that buying Cray was a completely insane thing to do. Cray's operations remain unintegrated with SGI, and there remains no "synergy" whatsoever between the two. It may have kept the Cray product line alive, but it nearly killed SGI in the process.
Belluzo may have been doing something useful that I'm unaware of (in the realm of cost containment, for example), but I have the impression that SGI's return to profitability had very little to do with him. He did not turn the company towards Wintel, that project was going already before he signed on (I would guess it was one of the things that attracted him). It is true that he seemed to be incapable of saying something as simple as "Oh, and by the way we're not abandoning Irix, so don't quit buying our other machines" (but it could be that the press just refused to quote him when he said that... the press in general, and the San Jose Merc in particular seemed to have it in for SGI in recent years).
And Belluzo did a number of things that annoyed the hell out of the old-time SGI people. One of his first acts was to ban dogs from the workplace (SGI has traditionally been a dog-friendly place). Whatever he was thinking, to us it all looked like a ridiculous piece of muscle flexing. Some people speculated he wanted people to quit so he wouldn't have to pay them lay-off packages.
Anywway: losing Belluzo is not at all a bad thing for SGI.
Turning to Linux is pretty clearly a good idea, though the question is whether SGI did it soon enough. If they'd listened to their techies, they would have been one of the first major companies to embrace Linux, now they're playing catch-up...
But I certainly would not want you to assume that SGI is dead. For one thing, I still have SGI stock (yes, I am an idiot) in fact, let me state right here that I heard a rumor recently that Compaq is thinking about buying SGI. Or maybe it was IBM. Or Nintendo.
But seriously, don't count out SGI. Last I heard, they were sitting on enough cash reserves to get through a long bad stretch. If anything I'd guess they're in a slightly better position today.
Kind of a humorous thread considering that VMS died years ago, yet VMS related business is bigger than all of SGI (based on revenues). I'd say IRIX is quite marginalized compared to Linux and Solaris.
...
been-there-seen-that
Sorry but I you pay attention to what is happening at the senior VP level at SGI. John Vrolyk, Senior Vice President in the Computer Systems Business Unit gave a speech at the Open Source Conference in Monterey. There he highlighted several things.
1. Linux is the OS of the future. Porting XFS to Linux is just the beginning. Every piece of OS IP (intelluctual property) that SGI owns is going to be open sourced. Right now they are reviewing patents/outside IP so that they don't step on anyone's toes. IRIX will be discontinued in so far that it will not exist as a seperate commercial OS. IRIX development will continue in the short term, however SGI understands the strategic value of open source. This not happening for several years, simply because they didn't want to overwhelm the open source community with too much to integrate. As John said,"I have 539 engineers who would overwhelm the open source community with features." So expect this to be a long multi-year deployment.
2. Beau believes that commercial Unixes are beginning their slow death knell. Eventually you will see two OSes (Linux and NT) based on largely the Intel platform. Linux is driving the cost of the OS to zero so that it will be exceedingly difficult to make money selling an OS. Likewise you will find Linux EVERYWHERE.
3. SGI has well over 1 billion in cash reserves. This puts them in fairly good financial footing and able to make strategic investments (like the 6 mil they pumped into VA Linux). So they aren't hurting that much. When VA goes public that investment will be worth quite a bit.
4. MIPS is platform which is of declining importance which SGI is moving away from. They aren't moving Linux to MIPS because SGI is moving away from MIPS.
These are gradual structural changes at SGI so expect them to take a couple of years.
Thalasar
While SGI's have been the overwhelming popular choice in Hollywood for doing CGI (as in computer generate imagery, not in the WWW sense), this is changing. More and more of this is being done on workstations running NT with packages like 3D Studio Max or the Crystal Graphics package (I can't think of its name right now, and last I remember it was a DOS app, but someone told me its now NT). Some of this includes some of the work on the Terminator 2 and Terminator 3 movies, The Abyss, Titanic, and others. (Ok, I admit these are all James Cameron movies...but there are others) No, SGIs aren't going away in Hollywood just yet, not by a long shot, but Intel-based hardware is becoming capable enough for production use.
My journal has hot
I, for one, would like to see the logs of this.
nm
Not taking issue with your commentary. I'd just like to add that (acc. to reports now circulating) Intergraph has thrown in the towel. No more PC's --no workstatiuons, no servers. SGI is hardly alone in failing to make money off NT (Neverending Treadmill tm). Maybe they can pull off the Linux move after all. I mean if any company has value to add to Linux, SGI is up there at the top.
Sorry to disapoint all you SGI bashers, but Irix and mwm are a smoother gui environment than anything I've seen under linux. All the parts are much better integrated.
I use Gnome, RedHat and Enlightenment at home, and old SGI indys with 5.3(!) at work, and even on my celeron 500, the graphics and overall fuctionality of the linux gui environment suck compared to that old indy.
I know motif is ugly, but it is a lot more stable, and the various accessories of Irix are much better thought out and implemented. Same for Solaris.
Now, that said, Irix does kernel panic on me a couple times a month. Linux never does that. The underlying OS is weaker, but the work environment is superior.
We regret to inform you that the incorporated business called Intergraph died (peacefully, in its sleep) late this afternoon. Stone cold? Indeed!
hahahahahahahahaaaaa An SGI Reality Engine maxes out at 10 million polys/sec, and thats a best case benchmarked figure. Perhaps that second 8 was a typo? And frankly, SGIs are no longer cost-competitve in the face of add on gfx boards for standard PCs from 3DLabs, Intergraph etc. Perhaps by using technology from NVidia (who, shock-horror, have built their technology solely on the back of the games market), they can continue to be competitive in the face of wicked-fast 'games cards' with geometry processors etc. on board.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Isn't it: Developmend work _on_ a IA32 _for_ an SGI-can! Wasn't people crying that it had to be the other way around?
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
I don't know very much about MIPS in particular, except that it started out as an especially radical approach to RISC (I think they tried to eliminate all pipeline interlocks - I don't know exactly what happened to that).
But I must argue with the idea that adding SIMD to MIPS, was neceaarily against the spirit of the project just on the grounds that "its not RISC".
RISC is to microprocessor design what OO is to software engineering. Everyone believes in it. Everyone thinks its a Good Thing, but noone can ever quite agree about what it entails doing in practice.
The original RISC projects at Stanford and Cambridge, took the (huge and crufty) instruction sets of the day, and analysed the instruction use frequency of compilers for certain languages (C mainly, but I think the Stanford group also looked at LISP and Smalltalk). The conclusion was that for C at least, a lot of silicon real estate could be freed by losing lots of instructions and addressing modes, concentrating only on those that were frequently used and making them fast by using more space in their implementation. It worked, but the optimisations made were pretty much the same in all RISC processors. They all tended to have a load store architecture, a large register file, relatively deep pipelines, and instruction and data caches.
It is this common feature set of RISC processors, which most people ended up understanding as the essence of RISC, rather than the careful empirical understanding of instruction usage that lay behind them.
In the design of the 486, Intel realise that you can apply these ideas to the design of CISC processors to. They separated the memory parts of the CISC instructions from the rest, added more registers (but hid them from the programmer), pipelines the system and added a cache. Hence the claim at that time that "RISC is dead/irrelevant/pointless". From that point on, no microprocessor designer has needed to go back to the principle of reducing the instruction set to gain speed. Mainly, this is because people have been much more careful about adding new instructions. Nonetheless the Alpha, and the modern MIPS processors have more instructions that anything that existed when the idea of RISC was first floated.
A lot has happened since then. Mainly the number of transistors on a chip has continued to double every 18 months, and inevitably that has led to a quest for ways to use this space to get more speed. Increasing the number of functional units and the depth of pipelines is one way, but beyond a certain number of FUs, the amount of parallelism that can be extracted by the instruction scheduler in the processor drops of. To gain any speed beyond that point, you need a smarter compiler, and one way to help the compiler to be smart is to add vector processing instructions. The problem then becomes getting enough data into the CPU, which is what the Cray boys were always good at, as I understand it.
This says nothing about the specific case of MIPS. Maybe MIPS really had architectural features that were incompatible with vector instructions. Maybe they just bodged it. Maybe the political infighting stopped it from working. Nonetheless, the statement "RISC processors cannot do vectors" is wrong, since many now do, and anyway the term RISC has been made meaningless through the degree to which it is now universally accecpted. Underneath the instruction set architecture - which still is now almost always very complex - there are no CISC processors any more.
% I've spent six months with an O2000 suffering
Email me, I'll see that this gets looked at by higher-ups at SGI.
Check news://comp.sys.sgi.misc and check out what Beau himself says -- without the filter of the press.
If you quoted him correctly and in context, he must be schizofrenic.
You continually mention the word 'fact'. I propose that you need to be a little more careful doing this because some people want evidence for such assertions.
Boss' demise was more complex than you say - there are still ex-Boss folk around, maybe they'll set you right. One of the biggest runaway costs in the effects industry was (maybe, 'is') employee salaries.