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Hardware

New SGI Intel Boxes Officially Released 67

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
David S. Miller was the first to write in to say that SGI has updated their web pages to announce the release of their new Visual Workstations. The page proudly proclaims "For Windows NT". The rumors are flying that these things will soon officially support Linux, so Cross your fingers and wait. Wonderful hardware. Seems like a shame to cripple it.
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New SGI Intel Boxes Officially Released More

New SGI Intel Boxes Officially Released

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  • Questions for anyone familiar with SGI/Irix:

    Realistically, could SGI port Irix to Intel chips?

    Could they maybe port 4Dwm, Indigo Magic Desktop (do they still have that?), the GUI sysadmin tools (which I've heard are good), the multimedia stuff, and all the 3D stuff to Linux or a BSD to get an Irix-like Unix environment running on one of those Intel boxes?


    --ccg, who is ignorant of all things Irix but will never buy an SGI to run NT.
  • the 17 inch flat monitor is 2.5k! I think i'd rather buy another machine with that money...



    ----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -
  • Where did you get those numbers?

    When I looked 3 hours ago, the 320 included 32x CDROM drive, A/V, and 10/100 Ethernet. Oh and did you check out the 6x AGP(next gen even) speed
    of the gfx pipeline?

    I'll grant you I prefer the G3 over any pentium
    but don't dish UMA cos it can dish ya.

    (66mhz PCI slots ... bahhahahahaha try 5x that)
  • www.linux.sgi is down.
    sgi seems really silent on li.org
    the FAQ on the site does not mention linux
    a search for linux on that site brings up nothing
    (this is a search on the new products site)

    some say something about MS not liking sgi
    dealing with linux, and shutting all that down.
    maybe thy were right. SGI now bows to microsoft?
    selling NT boxen is one thing, but having started
    stuff with linux and so suddenly and silently
    dropping it like this makes them seem to be
    bowing to microsoft. and losing my respect for them.

    ill ask at the "launch event"
  • IMHO, they already crippled the machine by putting an Intel processor in it, instead of a descent one. (Anything! MIPS R 10000, G3, Ultrasparc, Alpha).
  • One of the herd? Sure. But at least they're out in front.
  • Wooohooo! :)

    SGI is dead!

    MIPS is gone!

    Merced will run Crays!

    Hehehe.

  • Why? (Score:1)

    by mholve ( 1101 )
    Yes, they still have the "magic desktop" environment. The SysAdmin tools are pretty good indeed. A little incomplete, but you can do all the important stuff with them.

    I don't see them porting Irix to Intel though. Why would/should they? They're "real" boxes aren't going anywwhere...

  • One of the herd now? Hehehe. That's funny. Really funny.

    I suppose everything else SGI does means nothing and will just disappear now, right? Sure. Uh huh. Okay... :)

    SGI is still SGI. Just because they release an NT box doesn't mean jack shit. They're cashing in on the burgeoning NT graphical workstation market. It's their job, as visual workstation leader to provide workstations - so why not catch a little of the Wintel crowd?

  • You're comparing an Apple to the SGI?

    Did you forget about the SGI's waaaaay better bus? Video sub-system? Internal bandwidth?

  • Hey, doesn't anyone remember that Stephen Hawking uses an Origin 2000 to work on his theories, which if I'm not mistaken - was donated/lent by SGI.

    If he was using NT, I'd say it surely would be a "big bang" theory... Heh. It would be off by 2.26 million years (Pentium bug). :)

  • Hmmm, SGI and/or the Visual PC site is one of the few sites out there I've seen that haven't been "Slashdotted" to death - they're running Netscape Enterprise Server v3.6, probably under Irix. Guess SGI's aren't so "dead" after all. :)

    It's a toss-up. As much as I love SGI systems for visual/graphical work, I think I'd still go with a Sun for a Web server - although the Origin and Challenge systems are really nice as such as well.

    Just good to know that SGI can't be /.'ed. :)

  • Color management should ideally be a HARDWARE issue and not software at all. Things like monitor temperature, gamma, etc. It should then go to the OS level, where it affects ALL programs that utilize the graphics subsystem (otherwise, what's the sense in calibrating if Photoshop's "red" is different from Corel's "red"). Lastly, the applications themselves should be aware of all of the above and share that data so that each color is the SAME no matter what device it's on. THAT is color management.

    Pantone is indeed patented. However, it's a method to name/describe a color in a standardized fashion and doesn't really have anything whatsoever to do with color management.

    As for color correction and management, I have news for you. It has to do with a LOT more than just printed media. The "red" you scan should be the "red" you see on-screen which should print out as "red" on that printer or to video tape or to CD...

  • The Gimp's lack of colour management isn't due to patent problems; it's due to the Gimp being written by people who don't know what they're doing.

    What a completely assanine thing to say! Granted, the GIMP does not have all the features that say, Photoshop has, like Pantone, RGB, LAB and CYMK color models. First off, many of those are pantented. Secondly, the GIMP is still new. How long has Photoshop been around? I'm sure in time the GIMP will add other models.

    To say that they don't know what they're doing is not right. It may be true for all I know about GIMP internals, but hey...

    I haven't seen your name in the GIMP credits nor do I see you writing anything similar!

    I for one applaud and THANK the GIMP folks. If it weren't for them, I'd still be bitching that I have to run Windoze to do graphics.

    So please, keep really lame comments like this to yourself.

  • I disagree.

    Sure, there is no /dev/colormanagement device in Linux. Not even a /proc/color/management.

    However, NT has a way of frequently turning all your graphics into a solid shade of blue, so its color management is arguably far worse.
  • I was just at the NT rollout here in NYC and I asked the Linux question.

    According to the SGI people there:
    There will be no SGI supported version of Linux anytime in the near future. If there is to be one someone's got to hack one together.

    It's not as simple as it might seem as there is no BIOS on these machines as they boot from ROM. There may also be problems fully optimizing Linux for the machines as they have this unified memory structure. There will also be other issues that come up as SGI Linux is developed.

    Little or no software developed by SGI solely for IRIX has been ported to run on this machine. They have ported some of the Open Inventor libaries but not the applications as of yet.

  • Realistically, could SGI port Irix to Intel chips? Rumor is that they already have. When it was inquired as to the availability we were told that it was not an option at this time. Could they maybe port 4Dwm, Indigo Magic Desktop (do they still have that?), the GUI sysadmin tools (which I've heard are good), the multimedia stuff, and all the 3D stuff to Linux or a BSD to get an Irix-like Unix environment running on one of those Intel boxes? That could be done. Doing that would put thier widget sets there too, and then things like Maya are just a skip away. -danimal

  • Hmm, Let me think a minute. PII 450, Quality motherboard, 256M 7ns SDRAM, 12-18M video card...

    Nope, a rock solid kick butt box just doesn't seem to top $3,000 the when I add it up. And, with personal experiance telling me that SGI's support is less than pleasing, strike two.

    Now, they MAY(?) support Linux? Well, IMHO, they would be better off supporting IRIX on it, because that is the only way we would buy one around here. The only reason I can see for gettting this beast is price compared to other SGI's, and the fact that our department relys on some commercial software that the vendors will only port to IRIX (we have begged for years for something else). But, no IRIX? Strike three.

    If I wanted a hot PII Linux box, I think I would consider building one. This SGI looks like it has some Killer I/O bandwidth, and a very interesting chipset... but, when the smut hit's the fan, it's still the same CPU's...

    Don't get me wrong, it looks like it's a great box. But be fully aware, it's for a specific nitch, and it's not for everyone. I would probably say, IMHO, most people would be better servered with something else, considering some of the great stuff you could get in this price range. But if your one of those people who are in the nitch, be happy, now it's filled.... But I know, this thing just isn't for me.

  • And, BTW, another thing... WTF does Visual mean to SGI now days. This box is billed as thier Visual Workstation (which it seems to be capable of decent graphics) but then they are pusing that lame flat monitor that couldn't probably render decent animation to save it's life!

    Do they mean it looks cool? Obviously with that monitor, it's not because it will be stunning graphics. IF anyone out there get's one of these things, do yourself a favor, and consider getting a real monitor for it.

  • Thanks for making all Mac users look like uninformed, quasi-religiously blinded, idiots. While the new G3 series makes a good Photoshop workstation, and will likely be my next, good GOD, please get a clue. And have you ever even run Linux on a PowerMac?

  • But the new Apple boxes are butt-ugly and if I had to choose a sucky, lousy OS I'd take NT over MacOS anyday - I'd rather have neither. Make a linux comparison ad the SGI still wins due to the fac that LinuxPPC and MkLinus aren't up to speed with the x86 version.
  • Well put.
  • Ultrasparc? Talk about crippling. Those are so sluggish and really, really expensive.
  • If you are the same person posting this "professional color management" rant over and over, you ought to try chilling out. Go outside and look at the sky or something...

    Linux is missing a lot of stuff but "professional color management", that one you keep saying, is so far down the list as to be invisible.

    I work in special effects at Digital Domain (using SGI, NT, and Linux) and I can confirm we don't give a shit about "professional color management" or CMYK or Pantone colors or any of the other things that are "missing from Gimp". In fact Gimp does everything we need in a painting program (we use Amazon Paint instead, as it is nicer, but Amazon has no more "color management" than Gimp).

    Anybody who believes it is physically possible to match colors emitted from a phospher with colors caused by reflecting light off a silvered screen with colors produced by reflecting light twice through a dye and off a piece of paper should perhaps study physics a bit more.

    We do exactly what everybody should do: print an output on the final medium and look at it and decide if the color is wrong. "Relative color management" (ie saying "it's too dark, make it lighter, even though it looks ok on the screen") works perfectly even on the cheapest hardware and software.



  • My comments in January '99 issue of Samovar awards:

    http://www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu/~andrew/awards/ind ex.html

  • True...
  • I'd say its not so much a 64bit/32bit issue as a big/little endian issue. Intels 32bit processors are all little endian, MIPS and IA64 are bi-endian....

    There seems little ROI to port Irix to a 32bit little endian machine.

    Its the apps...
  • Yes, these boxes have high-end Compaq or high-end
    IBM prices at the start, which isn't too bad.

    But the upgrade prices are *SGI* upgrade prices,
    and those are indecently high - just look at what's suggested for memory, CPU or hard disc upgrades.

    I realise I can't get a UMA box with P2s in it anywhere else at the moment, but I'd like to know how much I could upgrade the machine with commodity parts.
  • Quad Xeon systems are pretty competitive with anything out there. Intel are *not* bad at processor design.

    My evidence - I ran a big distributed task across 25 systems ranging from a 486DX2/66 to an Alpha 533 and an Ultrasparc 267. The P2/350 systems beat both the Alpha and the Ultrasparc, the P2/400 systems beat them resoundingly, and the dual P2/400 was quite amusing.

    Tom
  • It is nice to see some governments gracefully admit their mistakes and move on, in contrast to others which pass ever more draconian legistlation in an effort to tame the free thought that is expressed on-line. Hopefully we'll be seeing more stories like this one in the months ahead (well, one can always dream).
  • Good, not great. It's not as good as some of SGI's other boxes (Onyx2 and Octane coem to mind). At least they did that right.
  • Are you sure about that? I was under the impression the G3 had the edge on the P2 in integer by a lot but that they were closer in fp. Granted I haven't looked at any recent SPEC scores so I might be wrong, but I thought that was the case.
  • Don't forget on itel you get FP or MMX, but not both without a large performance penalty.

    It will be interesting when the next generation PPC "G4" processors come out. Matrix math and FP without the performance penalty.

    I think the SGI's are great. Just like apple, they are a break with the old, no ISA, firewire, usb. But, just like MS, they ship late.
  • No matter how often you repeat the Unix canard about some missing feature of the OS being an "application issue," you won't make it true.

    Color management is a hardware issue, and only the OS should be directly manipulating the hardware. In addition, color management is crucial for any serious graphics -- to say that it's only relevant for print media is the height of, shall we say, "technical ignorance."

    The GIMP is a pretty amazing program, not so much for what it does, but rather for how sophisticated it is, given the overwhelming weaknesses of the underlying platform. X sucks.

    Regards,
    JFB

  • BeOS (Score:1)

    by sorphin ( 14046 )
    Yeah, Enjoy the lack of hardware supported currently. Yeah, BeOS is cool, i'm a developer, but, unless you're gonna do alot of media stuff, and only use hardware they _currently_ support, you're SOL.
  • That misses the point, though. The whole reason
    for the SGIs is 3D performance, and at that they
    rock. The 3D graphics performance is significantly
    better than the HP Kayak boards. The only thing
    that really beats it is the Intergraph Wildcats,
    and they cost more. Since main memory can be
    used as texture map memory with little or no
    performance hit, you can do riduculous things
    like use a gigabyte of memory for texture maps.
    Try and do that with an 8 MB graphics card. So SGI is selling very high
    performance 3D at a decent price.

    If you don't want to do 3D, these are not machines
    for you. If you need very high graphics performance and are willing to pay a manageable
    premium for it, these are good machines.
  • Yesterday one of those fancy SGI demo trucks
    was parked at the Caltech campus for a few hours.
    When I asked a SGI rep if they were going to
    support Linux in any way he replied that they
    are writing the graphics driver for these new
    machines and that in a few months they should be
    ready and SGI will officially support Linux...

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