On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 00:04 +0100, Adam Bower wrote:
I want an SGI Origin 2000 with lots of cpus and ram, I absolutely love their kit (even though it did run Irix) it was really good stuff and the cases are the coolest and most stylish in the business, people may say how cool Macs look but compared to the SGI stuff they don't even figure on the cool hardware radar.
Even down to the Indys Jazzy rift start up tune rather than the Mac's "Boooing" :-)
It was quite nice kit, not without fault (remembering the stories of the MAC Address being held in battery backed ram on the Indys) but nice kit.
The trouble was that they were quickly outpaced (at the workstation level) by PC's and as you say Linux clusters provide an alternative at the high end (although there are still a few tricks up the sleeve of SGI node clustering that I don't think can be so easily done with Linux)
In my opinion the biggest mistake they made was to not get onto the PC 3D expansion card bandwagon, with hindsight they could have been Nvidia (but probably better). They would have killed their own 3D workstation market but again with hindsight that was going to die sooner or later anyway.
A lot of Nvidia's technical staff came from SGI so if they had done this in the late 90's early 2k when the consumer GFX market was really exploding we would have pretty much the same tech as Nvidia but with the SGI logo (and probably open source drivers) Given the mindshare SGI had (at the time) they could have pretty much sold as many 3D cards as they could make.