SGI Releases New Workstations

Jonathan C. Patschke writes "SGI unveiled two new graphics workhorses today, the Tezro (an Octane2 replacement) and the much-anticipated Onyx 4. The presence of the old "bug" logo warms the cockles of my heart, even if the desktop Tezro looks much like a subwoofer."

ATI !!!

[Merlin42]

The huge news with the new systems does not seem to be mentioned on SGIs site. They use ATI chips/cards for the graphics .... SGI has given up on doing proprietary graphics solutions it would seem .. and with good reason imnsho!

news.com story [com.com]

LANL's purchase...

[anzha]

LANL [lanl.gov] bought an 80 processor Onyx 4. Check HPC Wire [tgc.com] for the story.

Reason for ATI - Re:ATI !!!

[bazik]

Reason for this change is that a InfiniteReality4 can calculate 3 millionen polygons/s, a ATI chip can do about 10 millionen polygons/s in immediate mode or 75 millionen polygons/s in display list mode.

More information in this article [heise.de], translation here [google.com].

A few notes...

[green pizza]

Tezro comes in both desktop and rackmount form factors. 1 - 4 MIPS R16000 processors, up to 16 GB RAM, 7 PCI-X slots from 3 busses. Based on Origin 350 architecture.

Onyx4 "supports" up to 32 graphics GPUs, but more can be added. Each pipe can drive one or two displays or up to 16 GPUs can be used together in parallel for increased performance. Onyx4 is essentially a new graphics brick to be used on Origin 300 or 3000 class host systems.

SGI has issued a press release discussing a monster Onyx4 they've already sold:
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2003/ju ly/lanl.html [sgi.com]

There are gobs of new SD and HD video card available for both new systems, as well as new audio card offerings. Both machines will seem to require at least IRIX 6.5.21 (the August 2003 quarterly release) to run.

I need one of those about like I need a semi truck

[djeaux]

However, I want one of those cases!

It makes me wonder, though, why an obvious workhorse machine is packaged up in a box that would make Alienware blush. Sorta like if White Freightliner started slapping Lamborghini-made bodies on their trucks.

OTOH, maybe SGI is onto something, since they market those things to graphic artists & designers...

Re:Nice...8086 Huh

[hamburger lady]

say what? [compsoc.net]

Re:Nice...8086 Huh

[The Mayor]

That is, it was never used in a PC product by IBM unless you consider the IBM PS/2 Model 25 and Model 30 IBM computers. If that is the case, then the 8086 was used in PC products from IBM.

Oh, maybe you mean one of the PC branded computers perhaps? Like the PC/XT or PC/AT? OK. Maybe you are right. But I think that is splitting hairs.

Exactly

[green pizza]

Infinite Reality 4 has 1 GB of texture ram and 10 GB of frame buffer memory... so it doe have its advantages for a few specific users. But for the most part, using ATI gfx GPUs (working either independently or in parallel) makes far more sense than having SGI use the last of their resources to fight the ATI/NVIDIA 3D war.

SGI's strengths are with architecture and I/O. ATI's strenghts are in pixel and polygon pumps. Looks like a perfect union to me.

Re:I need one of those about like I need a semi tr

[rhombic]

SGI has always had wild colored cases, weird form factors, etc. Check out the original indigos (big blue boat anchor-style cases), the sweet purple indigo2s, the octane with the light stripe in the front, or the funky little round O2 (hate that machine, can't balance a coffee cup on top). Weird cases are nothing new for SGIs-- not usually as pretty as the apple cases, but they always catch people's attention. And the old CRT monitors can be really, really great-- of course, they weigh 100 lbs each and take up your entire desk, but working on a 24" superwide CRT is true bliss...

Re:SGI Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Some older SGIs develop checksum errors on the SCSI bus, which can put a damper on disk throughput (as you might imagine). SGI offers a free replacement kit.

Re:So where can I buy the machine?

[Tyler Eaves]

No, you didn't, actually. SGI does not market to consumers or small businesses. SGI markets to corportations and institutions. The worlds where the purchase order is king.

Re:Whats it used for? Really...

[green pizza]

Other than driving multiple gfx displays, what is the main use for this workstation? I havnt used a SGI workstation, so share the info...

Depends on which machine you're talking about... the Tezero workstation or the Onyx4 visual supercomputer... two totally different products.

The Tezro replaces the Octane/Octane2. These days SGI workstations are usually used for software development for the big iron, HD video work, and for smaller-scale data crunching. Octane2 and now Tezro both have pretty amazing HD abilities, due mostly to the wicked fast architecture. These usually run specialized apps such as Discreet Flame or IFX Piranha. Other big data companies like these workstations for similar reasons. GE Medical uses Fuel (Tezro's little brother) workstations to collect and display 3D data from MRI scanners.

99.999% of the population has no need for an SGI... but there are folks out there that have tasks that utilize such huge amounts of data and need as little latency as possible... for these folks there is the mighty expensive SGI kit.

Re:ATI !!!

[gfxguy]

I agree... we are using SGI systems for which there simply does not exist a PC equivelent. The graphics subsystems, now an ancient six or seven years old (when did IR come out?) still outperforms, in many instances, anything available on PCs.

It's not just about raw polygon numbers, it's throughput and combining things like live video textures and so forth - things we use for live, on-air graphics that simply can't be done on any PC graphics cards we've seen, and that includes a very recent test (about a month ago) - our accountants would love for us to replace SGIs with PCs, it just won't work.

But now I'm sure we'd see the same limitations we have with PCs by using these ATI cards. So seven year old technology is still better than the new stuff (for our purposes).

Re:Insightful?

[autojive]

You've just been had by the classic Power Mac Problems Troll. [slashdot.org]

Re:So where can I buy the machine?

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

All I see it "contact a sales rep" crap. T-e-l-e-p-h-o-n-e, what's that? Fill out a form so you can get back with me if I'm a good enough customer?

What are the prices?

Why can't I just order up a couple machines off their web pages?

I was going to order 3 or 4 machines for a graphics project ohwell... Sorry SGI, you lose 'cause I couldn't get pricing information for even order the machines. Guess I'll stick with Dell or Apple.

(I'm being sarcastic, but I think I made my point)

SGI lost the battle for low-end machines long ago. Nobody in their right mind is purchasing low-end SGIs unless they already have a lab full of high-end ones and simply want compatibility - in which case they already have an established relationship with SGI.

The point is that if you want to render 3-D graphics on a wall of 36 LCD displays in a 6x6 grid, fed from a 2-TB server of image data, you can't buy Dell or Apple. You can't even put together a Linux box to do that. SGI is simply the only game in town that builds machines with graphics pipes that big.

Re:Oh come on

[zorro2676]

SGI used to (and may still) have an 18-wheeler for demo purposes. It does my heart good to know that someone was able to justify not only the cost of an 18-wheeler, but an 18-wheeler packed to the gills with SGI equipment. :)

Oh, and what did they have running on the InfiniteReality2 Dual-Rack? A flight sim.

In depth analysis of the new machines

[nurble]

can be found here [fxguide.com]. Written by the former hardware guru for discreet [discreet.com], it pretty much spells out what these machines are up to and how they compare to their predecessors. I'm no hardware guy, but it made decent sense to me. have at it!

Re:ATI !!!

[Merlin42]

First off they are no longer Silicon Graphics ... their name is officially SGI.

I am not completely familiar with IR or the exact ATI chip used in these boexes, but the FireGL X1 (based on Radeon 9700) can do 24bit(floating point)/channel, althoght the DAC is (iirc) only 10bit/channel. Is the 48bit color you speak of 12bit/channel fixed point?

What extensions are available on the IR that you can't get on a ATI?

I really doubt they could have sped up IR enough since they have almost no graphics patents/engineers left. Over the years 3Dfx, Microsoft, Nvidia, and ATI have pretty well divided up and taken/purchased all the graphics talent/patents at SGI.

ps

several years ago nvidia actually produced several workstations based on nvidia graphics chips, but that particular product line was VERY quickly EOLed. That was a while back when SGI was thrashing around and tried doing x86 'VisualWorkstations' (just before their ceo went to work at M$). They were kind of neat, but were very dificult to use b/c they had an odd mix of proprietary and standard parts that meant you almost had a(n unpleasent) surprise in store when working with them.

Re:Reason for ATI - Re:ATI !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

... the other reason is if I remember correctly, that Nvidia bought out SGI gfx division.

Re:Whats it used for? Really...

[nacs]

Actually the new G5s can support and address 8GB ram total.

It's not a bug!

[fm6]

When I worked at SGI (1998) everything had weird color schemes, the walls, the furniture, everything. And strange architecture too. Though the strangest [sgi.com] set of buildings just got subleased to Google. Which I guess is about getting away from their "Star Wars" image.

Which is they rebranded in 1998 to make the company logo the letters sgi with the bottoms cut off, as if they were appearing over the horizon. (New motto: "The Solution is in Sight!") But I guess that's even more obscure then the original logo, because now they just use the three letters.

And the original logo is very obscure. It's not a bug! It's the Chrome Cube [rhino3d.com]! The whole point being that you need an SGI workstation to render the damn thing. But nobody ever got that. So sad!

Re:2000th Post Troll

[nurble]

I use flame and inferno on octane and onyx respectively, and I can say that macintoshes (though I love them dearly) come nowhere near the realtime performance of SGI machines. It's not the CPU, or even the graphics processing, really, it's the bandwidth of the system. The fact that they can now play 2k 12bit images in real time. If you're sitting in a room with a director or an ad agency, you want to hit an image and see it, not wait for the thing to load into memory so you can play it. I can run an image through a maze of plugins and modules and have a viewable render in a few seconds. Macs and PCs have made great strides in playback and graphics power, but still don't move pictures through their architecture nearly as efficiently.

Re:Whats it used for? Really...

[TheSunborn]

Yes, but each TASK can still only use 4GB of ram. (OR use a hack similary to the Intel Xeon but that is ugly)

Re:Tezro VS. G5

[Alan Partridge]

So? SGI doesn't have Photoshop, Graphic Coverter, Illustrator, Freehand, Pro Tools, Logic, Xpress, InDesign, MS Office etc etc etc

If you want applications, I think MacOS can safely hold its own against IRIX.

Re:How relevant are these boxes?

[Dynedain]

I call BS

I do compositing using Combustion on my dual-athlon 2200 w/ 2GB RAM, and I've used it for 1080i HDTV......nowhere near realtime (try about 1:30 per frame for the output rendering). Combustion is the x86 version of the same apps from discreet (Flame) which runs on these SGI workstations in REALTIME.

Re:A Very Odd Datasheet. Where's the processor?

[RageEX]

Where did you get that bullet point from?

The 'at a glance' datasheet specifies MIPS R16000 CPUs. From http://www.sgi.com/visualization/onyx4/ataglance.p df

Silicon Graphics Onyx4 UltimateVision System Key Specifications
Incredibly compact form factors
- 8 CPUs and 4 pipes in an under-the-desk form factor (20"H x 12"W x 34"D)
- 16 CPUs and 8 pipes in a deskside configuration 17U high
- 32 CPUs and 24 pipes in a single 39U rack!
Specifically designed for advanced display environments
- Able to drive a 2 x 9M pixel LCD displays at a power user price point
- Breathtaking fidelity, power, and interactivity on over 100M pixels of display
Tremendous system infrastructure using the SGI® NUMA scalable architecture:
- Up to 32 graphics pipes per system
- Up to 64 advanced MIPS® CPUs per system
- Up to 128GB of high-performance system memory
- Up to 64 PCI-X slots delivery unparalleled network and storage bandwidth
- Support for dozens of professional audio and video streams
- SGI® IRIX® 6.5.20 64-bit operating system with a heterogeneous SAN filesystem
- Larger systems possible through custom bids

I wouldn't bet on it

[sjbe]

Wouldnt the new Apple G5's with dual 2 ghz cpus crush it?

I used to use an SGI Octane SSE on a daily basis for some engineering simulation work. Heavy number crunching and 3D graphics using QUEST [deneb.com.au] and some other software. My Octane had a 250Mhz MIPS processor and 768meg of RAM. Doesn't sound like much but for graphics horsepower it was essentially the equal of the dual processor 1Ghz pentium that sat across the aisle running the same applications. For pure number crunching (no graphics) the pentium was significantly faster but if there was a lot of graphics or disk I/O involved, the Octane did just fine.

Not to mention that I had the Octane crash precisely once in nearly 4 years. (had a board burn out, Octanes don't have the best cooling system and are slightly prone to overheating) Compare that with the almost weekly crashes of the Windows machine. When your job depends on 1-2 day analysis runs, you want a machine that is very reliable.

Anyway, to get to my point, no I wouldn't necessarily expect the G5 to run laps around the SGI machine. It might be faster, but probably not by a lot when you push them to the limit. Unfortunately for SGI, relatively few people actually need the features that set their machines apart. SGI makes great stuff (albeit very pricey) but it's for a very niche market.

Re:A very GOOD THING [TM]

[Alan Partridge]

700Mhz

3.2Ghz

32/7=4.57

maybe you should master your calculator before graduating to a personal computer?

Re:ATI !!! - another reason

[BWJones]

It could be as cool as when I had my Macintosh Quadra 840av, only more so. I had three NUBUS graphics cards on that that could along with FA-18 Hornet 1.0 display both front views and side views at the same time making for a seriously impressive simulator experience almost a decade ago back in 1993. Think about it. This possibility is made somewhat possible with dual outputs of many current video cards, but think of the immersive environments that could be created.

Re:Oh come on

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no, no, no, no. The 3.2 GB/s figure is the external interconnect speed. That's the Bedrock-to-Bedrock speed, if that means anything to you.

Memory bandwidth between the CPU's and the RAM is on the order of 16 GB/s... but I don't remember the exact figure. (16? 12? Something monstrous.)

On a Tezro, which is just a single-node SN2, that's your min and max bandwidth. On a multi-node SN2 like an Onyx 4 or an Origin 3900, it's your max bandwidth, and the min is 3.2 GB/s.