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SGI Releases New Workstations
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cool (Score:2, Insightful)
question (Score:5, Insightful)
What is a computer supposed to look like, and why?
I thought the Tezro was kind of nifty looking, other than its Nintendo Purple color scheme.
Re:How relevant are these boxes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, can your cheap lintel/wintel solution do on-the-fly manipulation of HDTV streams, for example?
Quite! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have gobs of IRIX code you need to run today, or if you need gobs of I/O on a desktop machine today, there isn't much other choice.
You're quoting specs from the Tezro workstation, which BTW, uses R16000 processors, not R4000. The Tezro uses Origin 350 architecture and has 3 PCI-X buses and two XIO buses (for gfx and HD/SD video I/O) as well as two builtin channels of SCSI. The thing is a full fledged data pump that I certainly don't need, but some folks do.
The new Onyx4 also uses Origin 350 and Origin 3000 host architecture, but can use all of that to feed 32+ ATI gfx cores per system. Can have each core drive one or two displays or can have multiple cores working in parallel. Two major uses -- doing crazy high end 3D or for visualizing big supercomputing data.
Beaten By Consumer Hardware. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now that stereo 3D is available with Linux and consumer hardware, the SGI offerings look a whole lot less impressive.
I looked into getting an SGI workstation a while back but since I wasn't a big corporation they treated me like I didn't exist. If SGI dropped their prices and marketed their stuff through something like Best Buy they'd have a chance of being more than a niche market supercomputer manufacturer but maybe that's all they care about anyway.
Re:cool (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Insightful)
I have two on my desk right now (an O2 and an Octane), and a couple servers in colo.
You seem to be forgetting that some people use their computers for work at work rather than playing the latest game at home. SGI systems are extremely good at what they do, and they make bad-ass systems for almost any problem that needs a lot of memory bandwidth.
But, yes, it'd be hard to justify a $40k workstation to play Unreal Tournament. It'd also be hard to justify an 18-wheeler to drive to the office every morning. It's all about situation and perspective.
However, used SGIs can be had for cheap-cheap on eBay. Try one sometime. If you keep an open mind, the SGI bug will bite you, and someday, you too might have an Onyx XL in your dining room. :)
Re:SGI Problems (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Multigen creator (Score:3, Insightful)
The "Multigen Creator" software they come with for 3-d rendering absolutely sucks and it's ridiculously slow when you have more then 20 polygons on the screen too. This is on an 02.
The O2 was new around 1997 (6 years ago) and was pitched as a lowend 'affordable' computer. It has shared video ram for chrissakes!
Re:Multigen creator (Score:4, Insightful)
Show me a PC from 6 years ago that could overlay video onto surfaces with special effects (warp, transform, etc.). Now rotate a cube with 6 of these video surfaces running in parallel (one per face) at any time.
"This hardware sucks because the program's crap" is almost never a good argument. Perhaps there's a mismatch. Perhaps the program is crap, but the hardware is cool. Perhaps
SGI's in general tend to be slow CPU's with massive internal bandwidth for throwing data around, and massively fast graphics for the day. If you're running a cpu-intensive program, then Intel is probably for you. If you want a graphics/media workstation, SGI is the way to go. Surprise, the Post/Film industry likes SGI's. Discreet Logic Flame/Inferno is still the dominant s/w, and it's head and shoulders above the rest.
Simon.
Re:Beaten By Consumer Hardware. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I need one of those about like I need a semi tr (Score:3, Insightful)
What the hell's wrong with that? Add more beauty to the world. No one loses. My day is considerably brightened when I look in the rearview and see a 360 Modena smiling back. A 6'x6' Mack truck radiator grille, OTOH, is a different story. And workhorses (the animals), by the way, have a beauty of power and form all their own. Compare with the BBBB (big, boring, beige box), which has... nothing pretty about it at all. Any deviation is a positive step.
You failed at making your point (Score:1, Insightful)
SGIs are not impulse items. You don't get a bug up your ass to plunk down for a $30000 workstation (unless you are some snotty rich kid who buys it just to have it). When you contact SGI you can often get deals out of the sales rep on hardware, software, bulk orders, etc. Sun is the same way (on high end servers), and Apple and can be to an extent as well.
Its like this for a reason.
Re:How relevant are these boxes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Out of the box, with the addition of a HD i/o card, probably a good SCSI RAID disk pack.
SGI's always been about moving massive amounts of data internally; your (and my) multi-ghz systems are still spending the vast amount of time stroking off while waiting for disk reads, memory copies, that sort of stuff.
I remember getting my shiny new Gefore3 and running the Zoltar demo [nvidia.com] for the first time. Amazing detail and quality and what not, but it actually pops up a, well, popup, saying 'please wait while we transfer an ungodly amount of data to your video card!'
What's the point of having a whomping video card when it takes a good thirty seconds to a minute just to transfer the data required to render a head and neck?
Re:Whats it used for? Really... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, I have some history with using SGI Octanes and O2's, and I would say that for my needs, there is absolutely no need for the SGI's anymore. The G5 can address 8GB of RAM, it can support multiple displays, as just about every Mac since 1987 has been able to do. (you are only limited by the number of available PCI slots or back when things were NUBUS, NUBUS slots).
In fact, the G5 has many of the technologies that made the Octanes so tasty back in their time. (Completely separate busses for memory, storage, IO etc....), even clustering is possible with the G5's, so if the software is available, I will save my $$'s and go for the better solution, which is the G5.
All of that said, there may be some that can benefit greatly from the SGI's, particularly those in rendering since that is apparently the Tezro's strongpoint (from looking at the specs). Too bad they stuck it with that awful name.
Re:How much? (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's the real problem with this sort of GORGEOUS piece of hardware -- on price points, a lot of businesses will just make their designers work on a Mac. And a good many more will decide that Macs are too pricey themselves & have their designers working on souped-up Windows boxes.
This is really unfortunately, but it's the way it is. I think what my own staff artist might be doing on an SGI workstation, but then I think what else we'd be doing without if we got him one :-(
Re:So where can I buy the machine? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sgi should drop their arrogant attitude and start caring about anyone who wants to buy their stuff.
Having a web store is quite normal these days and I don't understand why Sgi doesn't have one.
You make a good point (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A Very Odd Datasheet. Where's the processor? (Score:5, Insightful)
The marketing-speak "Industry Leading Processors" is awfully suspicious. The sad part is, SGI doesn't have any good options:
SGI has tried just about every dumb trick in the book (most pioneered by DEC) to find some way to move from thier ever shrinking niche (data visualization and computer animation) to something broader and more profitable. At each step along the way they have annoyed and alienated their loyal customers.
Re:Whats it used for? Really... (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't compare it (Mhz rating) to a Motorola PowerPC chip, or an Intel x86 / IA-64 / ARM chip, or an AMD x86/x86-64 chip.... they're not the same architecture.
Even if it was the same architecture, you'd have to compare IPC instead of Mhz. With different architectures, even that is a dicey comparison...
Apples and Oranges, my friend. You can't compare flavor, only nutritional information.
Re:ATI !!! (Score:1, Insightful)
No, their name is officially Silicon Graphics, Inc. SGI is their "DBA", a "doing business as" name.
the FireGL X1 (based on Radeon 9700) can do 24bit(floating point)/channel
He's talking about RGBA12, which is twelve bits for RGB and twelve bits for an alpha channel. Hardly anybody uses RGBA12. Most everybody uses RGB12. A few people use RGB32f.
What extensions are available on the IR that you can't get on a ATI?
Lots. Go look up the Infinite Reality programmer's guide.
several years ago nvidia actually produced several workstations based on nvidia graphics chips
This has nothing to do with the graphics thing. It was part of SGI's ill-advised effort to build and sell commodity Linux and Windows workstations. Nobody bought. The plan failed. Blame Rocket Rick.
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.
No. There were two generations of SGI Windows workstations: the 320/540, and the 230/330/550. The first generation used SGI graphics and had proprietary guts. The second generation used NVidia graphics and had commodity guts.
Origin 300 or 3000 class host (Score:4, Insightful)
Onyx4, for the most part, is just another Origin 3xxx class brick. In this case, it's the new Graphics Brick. Plug as many as you want into your existing Origin.
As most Onyx4s will probably be using Origin 350s as their host, then my best guess is R16K/700 CPUs.
The CPU performance doesn't matter quite as much in an SGI as it would in a Mac or PC.
Most folks that use SGIs for number cruching have picked that platform based on its trememdous amount of memory and I/O. If their task was simply CPU bound or didn't need more than a few hundred MB/sec of IO, they'd just use a PC cluster.
Most folks that use SGIs for graphics do so because they either need tight integration with video (HD or SD, see Discreet Inferno or IFX Piranha using SGI's DM3 HD video I/O subsystem).... or because they need multiple displays running of the same system. (http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2003/
Folks that use SGIs for both reasons typically require gobs of number crunching combined with some sort of display system that is able to plot the trillions of data points without bringing the machine to its knees. SGI has a lot of such cloak and dagger government / defense users.
There's also the growing Altix series of machines, which use Origin-class architecture with the Itanium processor family. There are rumors of a totally new MIPS processor coming soon as well.
The main point is that the new Onyx4 graphics are delievered in brick form, they're modular, and they will probably be eventually used on multiple SGI systems. And because SGI is leaving most of the 3D work to the ATI/NVIDIA pixel war, they can save some money and focus on other engineering aspects.
Re:Exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
No shame... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not likely at all imho. SGI's use MIPS as someone pointed out. The latest ones are 700MHz I believe. Another cool feature with the MIPS processors are that they don't consume much power. I seem to remember that they about 17w or so, allowing you to put a lot of cpus together without the need for a lot of cooling.
And when it comes to specs, I'm sure that someone can point out that the processor speed is not nearly as important as the architecture of the machine.
I think it was spec.org who did some test a few years ago comparing the 400mhz MIPS and a 1GHz AMD/Intel and found that the MIPS had about 70% of the computing power to the AMD/Intel, but when You put this in a multiprocessor machine (4 I think) the MIPS was 120% to the AMD/Intel and when scaled up even further(16-32), AMD/Intel wasn't even on the charts.
No, SGI has NOTHING to be ashamed of when it comes to their MIPS.
Re:So where can I buy the machine? (Score:2, Insightful)
Typing it into the little white box a million times won't make it true, you ignorant asshat.
Re:A very GOOD THING [TM] (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes the mhz myth bla bla bla but I have yet found a processor that can do 10x more work per clock cycle then a standard P4. The p4 is out 4ghz so the processors in these beats would have to be 10x as efficient.
High speed ddram and rambus as well as scsi in high end pc based workstations offer a much better solution for 10th of the cost.
Re:cool (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually... it was a very good troll. I really think there needs to be a +1 troll option for the trolls that generate good responses.
Re:Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
My favorite is when trying to install the driver for an ATI card (only card in the system) the program telling you that "You do not have an ATI card installed."
Know what - it's right now - I no longer have an ATI card installed.
Re:A very GOOD THING [TM] (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, this thing can move more bandwidth back and forth to memory than your PC can dream of. The link between nodes is 1.6GB/sec full duplex ( Of course, we over at Cray can do 16 times that but I digress
So the moral is, while you can sort of get away with doing a MHz-MHz comparison on two different processors, the overall architecture of the system is what counts if you really want to get work done. This is why SGI and Cray are still in business.