The important things in the announcement were the product
road maps, spinning off of MIPS, working with Intel & MS
and explaining the markets.
(DISCLAIMER: I work for SGI/Cray, this is just from the
announcements/talk with some explanations).
Intel is not yet ready for moderate to high performance
computing. (For performance you need bandwidth, stability
under large loads, etc.). News of SGI working with Intel
is significant and that the O2s to Onyx2's are in a path
to move to Intel running Irix (with Microsoft interoperability)
will offer stability, performance, and scalability.
The Wintel box will offer better graphics capabilities, and a path
to better Wintel performance. The Windows NT stability/scalability
is still a issue, so there is the Irix/MIPS and eventually Irix/Intel
with Microsoft interoperability. Which would allow Wintel
customers to grow their systems and new customers that require
100% uptime with a 24x7 schedule under heavy loads.
Also it let current customers know that SGI is still supporting
the current line and there will be continued growth and speedups.
They can rest assured they don't have to move to Wintel, this would
especially be a concern of large graphics/entertainment, Government,
automobile and other large scale computing/graphics industries.
They require high bandwidth, large data, high reliability.
As a FYI, the SGI/Cray T3D/T3Es have scaled to over 1,000 CPUs for
years, and has been a regular product.
Mark |
