Steve -
Not to further a religious war, but ...
I do believe I said the MIPS would live on as a consumer product (didn't I.. cause if I didn't I meant to).
We can subsidize the production of better chips by selling the lower end models into the consumer space. We'll continue making money with the likes of the R10k, R12k, and R13k, and in a couple of years, those chips will make it into the consumer space. For now, though, we'll be more than happy to put them into servers and make money now. We earn money for them now, and again later.
As for the OS itself, sure it's nice and yes it has the "64 bit advantage", but most of MS's NT code is "bit neutral" and could relatively easily be taken to 64 bit (I believe the NT filesystem is already 64 bit on Alpha's?)
Do you really believe it's this easy? Sure has caused all (2) the vendors that have tried it fits. One of the problems is the applications. There is only (1) vendor that has maintained 32bit compatibility with a 64bit OS, AFAIK.
We have a lot of the same customers... trust me (we do high-end cad, cae, etc.). A lot of our customers are finding that for 9/10 of their needs, an x86 box does just as well..
Our market is becoming less and less focused on graphics. We're making significant amounts of money in the server market, which is good for me since I'm really not a graphics guy. That aside, however, our bread and butter graphics customers are the vis. sim sites, manufacturing sites, and oil/gas exploration sites. x86 will do just fine for some things, but it doesn't do minivan crash-testing very well.
I really think SGI made a smart move acknowledging the market and I can't wait to see an SGI openGL accelerated videocard on the general market (pass that one along to your bosses).
If you think they listen to me, I'll sell you an openGL accelerated bridge ;)
While I understand what you are saying, I have never gone from 1 to 128 CPU's without a hitch. Mind you I have never tried it with SGI equipment, so maybe it's possible, but usually there is something in there
We can run the same OS on machines from Indys to an Origins. The Origin line scales from 2 to 1024 processors, pay as you grow. Hot-swappable everything. cc-NUMA SMP. Here's one customer's experience :
We installed Oracle on a 2-way O200. We had a single glitch during the install of 7.3.3.0.0, but were able to resolve it with Oracle tech
support. For the things that Oracle is supposed to do, it's a dream to use--extremely fast, and it's fast as well. Not to mention fast.
Here was how I remember the setup for the O200: pull it out of the box, put it into the machine room, attach a 100baseT network cable, attach a serial cable (for the console monitor), plug it in, boot it up, and it was on the network, configured, in about 30 minutes. Compare that to an UltraSparc, where you spend half a day putting it together yourself, whether you buy direct from Sun or through one of their VARs.
We spread the database across the system disk and 5 2GB disks (6 disk
compromise). Installing lots of disks is easy: turn off the machine
(thereby initiating a controlled shutdown), slide in the additional
disks, power the machine back up, create a new file system on each disk (mkfs takes about a second per 2GB disk), edit /etc/fstab, mount, and you're running.
Sure, YMMV, but if this guy decides later that he needs an additional number of CPUs, from 2 to 1022, he can just buy the rack modules, connect the cables, and power back up.
MS's support of clustering isn't of it self as signficant as what it shows. It shows that MS is ready to get serious about the "big" server market.. and you must know as well as I do, Billy is driving the steam roller.
I've seen a Origin with more cpus than I've got MB of ram, with load averages of ~55, running very large databases striped across terabytes of disk. That's a 'big' server market. People buying these machines care about things like memory and i/o bandwidth. Do you have any idea what the remote memory access latency is on a NT cluster? I could go to lunch in that amount of time ;) I won't even talk about uptime.
Yes, Billy is driving the steam roller, but he's trying to drive it where the roads aren't paved, and he doesn't have a map. Marketing may overcome this, but then again, it may not.
-justinb |
