Hi Michael - some good points.
> I will agree with you on one point. Unix Workstations are being
> replaced by lower cost Pentium and Pentium/Pro machines in the
> government sector. However, WindowsNT is not necessarily the OS of
> choice for these computers. I've seen alot of organizations,
> including my own, adopt Linux (or a commercial Unix). In this era
> of tight budgets, free software is getting a serious look from
> contractors and government agencies. The free UNIX's have matured
> and are just as capable as many commercial packages. Increased
> market share for Intel will not necessarily increase market share
> for Microsoft.
Does Linux perform well now on CISC architecture? My conclusion several years ago was that it was great software for converting a 486 into a 286. I also used Interactive UNIX and was equally unimpressed.
Another UNIX geek-type also mentioned several months ago that he liked Linux.
One of the big problems I see that is moving people to NT is that there a ton of folks with two workstations in their offices; One running UNIX and another running some Windows variant. I don't see hardware as the issue as much as that people want to run all of the apps available on Windows but need UNIX to get into the home-brew apps. If UNIX can be made to totally emulate Windows, then UNIX wins. In the mean time, I see a lot of businesses going to a single Windows box where there used to be a UNIX box and an old Windows box. Then they just run one of the X emulators to get to their UNIX apps. I don't see this happening as much yet at government facilities I work with or in academia.
> The real question is whether this trend affects SGI. In my opinion,
> the answer is no.
If I didn't agree with you on this point, I wouldn't be long SGI. But having used SGI since the old IRIS 2500 box, I see more pressure than ever from the low end.
> SGI has a reputation for building powerful servers and multi-media
> workhorses. They have always concentrated their resourses on this
> market that demands high I/O bandwidths. PC's may have made quantum
> leaps in CPU power and 2D graphics that have caused them to catch-up
> with many other UNIX vendors.
I agree. PCI I/O bandwidth is about 140 MB/s and about 2 GB on the new SGI stuff. BUT the new PC 3-D graphics cards getting around this bottleneck by doing a lot on the card to not require the high bandwidth on the bus.
> But PC's still lag far behind in I/O architecture. There are
> companies that build Intel-based servers with powerful I/O
> subsystems, but these companies charge nearly as much as their UNIX
> competition. There is not an Intel based-machine that can match the
> graphics performance of an Onyx or the disk I/O of a Challenge
> server. (Sorry, no experience with the O2 architecture yet.)
True. But how many Onyx's and Power Challenges do they sell? Not many. Their bread and butter has turned to low end systems. As I
said in an earlier post, "reality" can be modelled quite well with
1M textured polys/sec. You had to buy an Onyx for $100K-$200K to do
it 3 or 4 years ago. You can get several NT workstations now that can do it for $15K street price. SGI will always be able to draw more polys than other boxes but people are not going to pay premium prices if they don't need it. The architecture issue is a moot point IF the box will do what people want it to do. So the real issue here is what happens to SGI's low end market when you can buy a VGA compatible card that renders 1M polys at your local computer store for $199?
> In many ways, SGI is the "Apple Computer" of the UNIX world.
Which scares the daylights out of me!
> They concentrated on particular markets and have won many loyal > customers.
True. But as I've said in earlier posts, an alarming number of big loyal customers are leaving.
> However, unlike Apple, they have made no expensive attempt to appeal
> to a broader audience. They have remained focussed on providing the
> best computers for video editing, 3D animation, VRML publishing,
> and scientific visualization.
If they are going to continue to grow, they are going to have to broaden their market.
> It will be many more years before the PC can challenge SGI's
> dominance in this explosive market.
I disagree on this one. They are feeling the heat on graphics not only from NT but other UNIX boxes. If you want to see the entire run down by Standard Performance Evaluation Corp., look at their web site. Sorry - I don't have the URL handy. (Another search keyword is "ViewPerf") They've done standardized tests on most of the Open GL workstations so you can get an idea of how SGI stacks up.
I see SGI's big growth area in servers for high OLTP apps and data warehouses. NOBODY can beat their performance here. I am very surprised that they did not talk about this in their annual report. But I know of a couple of big SGIs that have been installed lately sans graphics. They are getting competitive with HP and Sun just can't get their performance. The Origin 200 and 2000 have been specifically designed for these purposes. |
