Re: Intel misses Itanium sales (...SGI moved just over 1,000 boxes...)

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• In reply to: arie van schutterhoef: "Intel misses Itanium sales (...SGI moved just over 1,000 boxes...)"
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Date: 01 Mar 2005 19:47:21 +0000 (GMT)

In article <010320050148027946%arsche@xs4all.nl>,
arie van schutterhoef <arsche@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>Hopefully SGI (previously proudly called Silicon Graphics) manages the
>same...

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

• Previous message: David Anderson: "Re: cin >> std::min -->No operator ">>" matches these operands"
• In reply to: arie van schutterhoef: "Intel misses Itanium sales (...SGI moved just over 1,000 boxes...)"
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