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Tim Cutts
*nix forums beginner
Joined: 08 Aug 2002
Posts: 30
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 Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2005 7:47 pm Post subject:
Re: Intel misses Itanium sales (...SGI moved just over 1,000 boxes...)
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In article <010320050148027946%arsche@xs4all.nl>,
arie van schutterhoef <arsche@xs4all.nl> wrote:
| Quote: | Hopefully SGI (previously proudly called Silicon Graphics) manages the
same...
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Personally, I think SGI are playing very canny at the moment. The high
end workstation market is so reduced now they could never make money at
it any more, and are right to be withdrawing.
The same goes for the low-mid end server market. That market is
saturated; HP and IBM dominate it, and there are any number of other
players too.
The market is being taken over by Linux; in order to compete, SGI
needed to offer that OS. Proprietary UNIX is dead, and SGI are merely
following the market (as are Sun, HP and IBM - they all still have their
own UNIX, but they're all supporting Linux too).
They had a classic niche offering in the Origin 3000; no-one else
makes anything like it. Porting it to Linux was an obvious step to
compete with the Linux clusters which form most of the Top 500 now.
As others have pointed out, further development of MIPS in-house would
not have been cost effective. So they committed to the up-and-coming
IA64 architecture. Remember when that decision was made, there weren't
many other choices. Opteron didn't exist, and the writing was on the
wall for Alpha.
And we're left with a unique product; a Linux box which you can scale
independently in CPUs, memory, I/O. At work we needed a 4 CPU box with
at least 128 GB of memory. We didn't really care what the processor or
OS was - the memory/CPU ratio was the important thing. And no-one can
build you something like that except SGI. Lovely niche market.
But I grant you - it may not seem like that if you're one of their old
graphics workstation customers.
Tim |
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John-Paul Stewart
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 20 Feb 2005
Posts: 497
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| Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2005 3:11 pm Post subject:
Re: Intel misses Itanium sales (...SGI moved just over 1,000 boxes...)
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arie van schutterhoef wrote:
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that "SGI moved just over 1,000 boxes to take 4 per cent of the market".
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Is that 1000 computers = 4% of Itanium-based computers? Or is that 1000
computers = 4% of Itanium CPUs?
IIRC, somewhere (but I'm not sure where) I saw stats that showed SGI
wasn't near the top in number of Itanium-based _computers_ sold, but was
in the five for number of _CPUs_ shipped. A single 256 CPU Altix is
counted as _one_ system by some statisticians and considered equivalent
to a 1 or 2 CPU system from another vendor. |
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Ian Mapleson
*nix forums addict
Joined: 29 Apr 2005
Posts: 54
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| Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2005 10:18 am Post subject:
Re: Intel misses Itanium sales (...SGI moved just over 1,000 boxes...)
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The answer should be obvious for anyone who's kept up with how this
market has developed over the years.
There's no way SGI could have produced its own design at a price
competitive enough to beat Intel's offering of the day. SGI's CPU
would have been faster (around 30% or more I was told) but not
*enough* faster to warrant the higher cost. Add to that the lure
of Intel salaries for the IA64 programme and the inevitable staff
movements which followed, and there you have it.
Some of SGI's ideas are now in the IA64. It's a fast chip, it's scaling
well and SGI is doing good things with it. Whatever one may have
wished had happened, the real world isn't like that. Would you have
been able to turn down $85/hour?
Ian.
SGI Depot: http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/sgidepot/
Email: mapesdhs@yahoo.com
Backup email (send copy to this too): sgidepot@blueyonder.co.uk
Home: +44 (0)131 476 0796 (best to call this number first)
Mobile: 07743 495403 (usually off; leave a message and I'll call back)
SGI/Future Technology/N64: http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/
Doom Help Service (DHS): http://www.gamers.org/dhs/ |
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arie van schutterhoef
*nix forums beginner
Joined: 22 May 2005
Posts: 24
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| Posted: Mon Feb 28, 2005 11:48 pm Post subject:
Intel misses Itanium sales (...SGI moved just over 1,000 boxes...)
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Under the heading of "Intel misses Itanium sales mark by $26.6bn"
the English webzine The Register mentions at:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/28/itanium_04_sales/
that "SGI moved just over 1,000 boxes to take 4 per cent of the market".
I can imagine that some people will have to undergo some serious
questioning.The most serious ones that I can envisage are: why did we
ever became dependent ofout-off-company development (swapping MIPS for
Intel) in the first place,and why did we forsake our own roots
(abandoning Irix for Linux - previouslyWindows NT). I remember Apple
doing silly things during the midterm Nineties,barely surviving untill
the discovered their own strength.
Hopefully SGI (previously proudly called Silicon Graphics) manages the
same...
AvS |
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