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Technology Stocks : Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI)
SGI 91.07-0.9%Dec 8 3:59 PM EST
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To: Mat Miller who wrote (626)1/15/1997 3:31:00 PM
From: Simon   of 14451
 
SGI Employee, speaking personally. All information is publically available, all statements are my own.

Mat,

Spot on, the MMX is in true WinTel style a little over-hyped. Its still better than a kick in the teeth though, and is part of the PC evolution. PC's inhabit 'commodity space' which means that they evolve as quickly as (say) Unix boxes or SuperComputers, but the economics of the market mean that they are always somewhat behind. The distance varies (cf Indy vs High Spec PC in September '96, and O2 vs High Spec PC in October).

Note too that Sun have always had an MMX like approach, and it works well for some things, but like many architectural design decisions has drawbacks. In particular the bus can get really savaged doing memory <-> CPU multiple times before finding whatever is left of the OpenGL (or whatever) graphics pipeline on the graphics card.

I have yet to find a really convincing argument for not keeping the maximum amount of graphics functionality in one place (typically the graphics card, but in really low end it could be an entire Open GL pipeline subset on the CPU silicon).

MMX seems like a bad architectural choice, with strong marketing incentives. It also helps WinTel shape the graphics card market by influencing graphics card design in a particular direction (by decreasing certain costs).
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