> is a radical commitment to IRIX/Linux on Intel and a weakening ardor > for NT part of SGI's coming announcement?
<of course, these are my personal comments and opinions, not SGI's>
Not really. NT plays in totally different markets than Linux for the moment -- not that Linux isn't maturing, but it's missing quite a number of APIs that are present in the NT space (yet), and ISV support for Linux is, for the moment, much less mainstream. Not that SGI isn't contributing to Linux to help Linux mature, but it's not there yet, and nor are e.g. the CAD applications.
Even IRIX and NT share APIs, but there's lots of functionality in IRIX that just isn't there in NT -- I have quite a few Maya customers with 320 saddened by the fact they can't render in the background in "weightless" mode and continue working interactively; on NT, the render jobs just hog the CPUs completely if you let them onto your CPU.
As far as servers go, it's pretty much the same story -- Unixy servers (LINUX/IRIX) can deliver things an NT servers can't and vice-versa, and on the Unix side, UNICOS, IRIX and Linux are on different places on the cost and features scales, and appeal to different people.
Again, SGI is pretty firmly committed to help Linux grow into the space where more sophisticated/robust/scaleable features are necessary, but it's not there yet -- but for *some* things (I'll stress that -- *not* all things work as well as on IRIX/MIPS, esp. with IA32 processors), it's already a cheap alternative to low-end IRIX servers, esp. if you don't use any of the fancy stuff in IRIX and 'just run' programs that fit IA32 servers well and give decent code with the Linux compilers. |
