will there be a future for SGI??

I

i_wolf

New member
Hi all,
out of interest what are your takes on the said topic above. I mean with the latest opteron, G5, Itanium 2 and other 64bit processors due this year.... and these are being released at relatively cheap prices... especially the AMD stuff. Bandwidth is improving dramatically.... PC graphcis cards are phenominally powerful, wildcat anyone, or QUadro 4.
Do you reckon that the pace of the PC technology will eventually kill most of SGI's business with graphic artists... i mean they charge $14000 for a machine and (i am no expert merely in my opinion) you could get a fantastic dual xeon, dual athlon mp, with quadro 4 for about $4000 maybe less.
I know that they are currently pitched at different markets but will the pace of PC market rush the PC into SGI niche where Wintel will dominate???
Your opinions please.
Oh and for what its worth.... i would love to get my mits on an SGI box... seam incredible machines!
regards,
I_wolf.
 
No, SGI has the marketed towards professional users. Lucas arts uses them and so do many universities. A school here in Orlando called Full sail ( a tech and media university) has whaat they call an "O2 lab", where they have about 90 SGI octane stations.
 
I think SGI will either be out of the market pretty soon unless they change they radically change their products to make the difference from a standard PC larger. You can run most professional workstation apps with gaming cards these days, the uses for a professional card are getting smaller and smaller. I think that's the no.1 reason 3dlabs is reentering customer level graphics, the professional market is getting too small and depending on it only will not work in the future. I think SGI will have to go the same way, but I'm not sure they will survive at all. They are already doing serious losses AFAIK and have sort of become an server provider more than a graphic company already.
 
Humus- Sorry this is off topic from this thread, but what compiler do you use? I just inststalled Visual Studio .NET and the VC++ doesnt like any of my code, i havent been apble to get anything to work, not even example code in books. I dont like this .net stuff so far, i have some knowledge of VB6 and havent been able to get stuff to run with that either.
 
I use vc++ 6.0, didn't like .NET that much either. They have ruined the interface too much.
What kind of code are you talking about here, OpenGL code? Does it compile but not link, or doesn't it even compile? What are the errors?
 
I HATE .Net... just my 2¢
With the upcoming product line from AMD and the graphics market I feel that SGI's business will have a rough time following them.
 
Well, if you were an investor, then buying SGI a few months ago at 31 cents would have been great since they are now in the $2 ~$3 range.

SGI is in three businesses, generally speaking.

1. High Performance Computing (i.e. supercomputers). They do not have the fastest HPC machines. They do not have the cheapest HPC machines. They do have the easiest to use HPC machines. My site has a 512 CPU, 400 MHz Origin 3800. It has the highest utilization of all the HPC machines at my site, dethoning the venerable Cray T3E.

2. High end visualization servers. This is the Onyx series of computers. I have 3 Onyxs with Infinite Reality graphcis; 1 Onyx2 with InfiniteReality2 graphcis, and I am about to buy an Onyx 340 with InfiniteReality4 graphics. (The IR4 has yet to be announced.) Here SGI has competition from Sun (stop laughing ... I know Sun is a joke here), HP with their SV6, and to a lesser extent, IBM and Compaq.

Having evaluated Sun, IBM, HP, and SGI, I can say that SGI wins this category by a long shot. However, HP with their SV6 is closing fast. An SV6 basically takes HP workstations with fx10 graphics cards and gangs them together in parallel to render images. Imagine a Radeon 8500 MAXX. Now imagine 16 Radeons, not 2 like in the mythical MAXX. The SV6 rocked. It took one of our OpenGL codes and ran it at 35 fps using 16 graphics pipes. The Geforce 2 Pro manged 15 fps, but could not load all the data. Sun managed 3 fps, but could not load all the data. SGI tied HP, but had better image quality, and better software, thus winning the buy. SGI is far ahead of HP in terms of software. HP's approach allows for higher level of antialiasing ... 64X.

HP's approach is the correct one though. In 2 years .... who knows. Maybe HP will kill SGI. Maybe the merger will kill the HP and their SV6. Who knows.

3. Graphics workstations. (O2, Octane, Octane2, Fuel) Here SGI is struggling. We are dumping our Octanes for WIntel workstations using the Wildcat 6110 graphics cards. THe initial purchase cost was cheaper. The yearly maintenance was cheaper. Heck, for the yearly mantenance on an Octane we could buy a new Wintel workstation.

SGI still leads in the area of image quality. A GeForce4 uses 8 bits per RGBA for 32 bit color. SGI uses 12 bits for 48 bit color. But SGI loses in terms of "frames per second", cost, and maintenance.
 
People are very tired of SGI. There was a time when SGI could lead people around by the nose, because they were the only ones in town, but that isn't working anymore. Their stuff costs an arm and a leg, is often slower than cheap x86 systems running Linux, and they treat their customers like crap.

I was talking to a guy who works at ILM. Like most companies, they're relying less and less on SGI and more and more on Linux boxes.
 
If you take the R8500 on a high end pc and compare it to SGI's products, when would the R8500 been equal to SGI's state of the art machine - 10, 15 years ago? Howabout a comparison between SGI's machines now and PC's and vid cards of the future? In 10 years time?

Do you understand what I'm trying to ask?:confused:
 
Shikatanai said:
If you take the R8500 on a high end pc and compare it to SGI's products, when would the R8500 been equal to SGI's state of the art machine - 10, 15 years ago? Howabout a comparison between SGI's machines now and PC's and vid cards of the future? In 10 years time?

Do you understand what I'm trying to ask?:confused:
Click to expand...
Even if that was true (which it isn't), you can get quite a few Linux boxes for the price of one SGI machine.
 
What I meant to ask was from what period in SGI's history could you take a workstation and it be the same power as a current high end pc with an R8500. The answer I was looking for would be something like "1985". The second part of the question was referring to an SGI workstation now, and when home users can expect to see that kind of power on a home PC. Example answer would be 2010.

I don't know whether I cleared that up or made it even more confusing :bleh:
 
Shikatanai said:
What I meant to ask was from what period in SGI's history could you take a workstation and it be the same power as a current high end pc with an R8500. The answer I was looking for would be something like "1985". The second part of the question was referring to an SGI workstation now, and when home users can expect to see that kind of power on a home PC. Example answer would be 2010.

I don't know whether I cleared that up or made it even more confusing :bleh:
Click to expand...
Oh, I see. I thought you were trying to make a point. Sorry about that.

SGI isn't really much faster, I don't think. On the one hand, the gaming cards aren't that well suited for rendering, but that's where all the money is, so ATI and nVidia can do a lot with a a cheap card.

At best, the answers to your questions would probably be something like early 2001 and late 2002. :) Computer technology just moves too fast.
 
Humus said:
I use vc++ 6.0, didn't like .NET that much either. They have ruined the interface too much.
What kind of code are you talking about here, OpenGL code? Does it compile but not link, or doesn't it even compile? What are the errors?
Click to expand...

It doesnt even compile, i get some "Win32 code is out of date" or something like that. I forget becuase i removed that junk from my system. It completely screwed up my Windows settings and now all kinds of strange things are happening on my system. Ill switch to VC++ 6, thanks for your help !
 
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