You are obviously `in the know'. Would you care to substantiate any of these comments?
>They have very lousy margins on their latest $6k machine.
Would you care to see the business models for all the Wintel vendors? I doubt they paint a very bright picture wrt margins. E.g., May I remind you that in the last several years, Intergraph has managed to lose money on *every* quarter but one, even when grouping their S/W and H/W [hint: their application software is rather good].
It is always possible to present any information pertaining to SGI pricing in an unfavourable daylight...
a) machines are cheap => "Their margins must be too low"
b) machines aren't cheap => "SGI is pricing itself out of the market, they're confined to a shrinking high-end niche"
We've had mostly b) in the past. Don't feel obliged to correct the balance by spreading a), unless you can substantiate that.
>I have friends in the division who said they don't believe they will
>be a viable u-processor design group by next generation.
Egineers in the division knowing anything about it are under non-disclosure. "Those who know can't tell, those who tell don't know". Comparing even specfp95 numbers (and God do I mistrust these), it will take some time still before they ship an Intel system capable of 19 specfp95, whereas there are MIPS-based (and DEC and HP) *systems* available now that do.
Yet the Intel processor family is not generally regarded as non-viable ;).
>The problem is SGI doesn't have the volumne need to drive the cost of >the u-processor down. So NEC doesn't have the economy of scale.
SGI does not need to. It gets very tiring to explain the MIPS business model over and over again in this forum. SGI accounts only for a small percentage of MIPS processors shipped.
The bulk of processors shipped by NEC and others are derived from the *former* SGI hi-end processor families, R{2,3,4}K. Expect R10Ks to trickle down to other products in due course, long after SGI stops using them in high end systems.
It is one important difference wrt PA-RISC, UltraSparc and even Alpha. These only exist for the sake of the workstations built around them, so anything they invest in them has to be recouped from sales of workstations.
>The backlog comes from the fact SGI isn't executing and can't make
>the systems.
Wait and see...
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