A niche, we should all have such a niche...
AFAIK the so called niche market that SGI is pursuing is bigger than
all of it's workstation markets to date. Now if they were just
releasing something like HP's $12-31K FX6 box that's a niche.
Clearly the Silicon Graphics Visual Workstations aren't
Bob-in-accouting-needs-Excel-and-Word boxes. These are going for
less than $1000, and don't have anything to do with SGI strength's
advantages, assets, and core competancies. For those of who face
challenging 2D and 3D graphics everyday from whistle to whistle --
these are the kind boxes we've been waiting for -- at a price we
can justify to management.
From a post of mine to Yahoo
Silicon Graphic Visual Workstation benchmarks
See:
sgi.com
(apparently one of these is some kind of record)
Benchmark Result
High-End Winstone 99 29
High-End Graphics WinBench 99 310
High-End Disk WinBench 99 14,900
Business Winstone 99 30.7
Business Graphics WinBench 99 160
Tri Strip (Tmesh) 4.16 Million/s
(RGB, 25-Pixel, smooth shaded, Z, 3D, 1 infinite light)
Tri Fill 7.39 Million/s
(RGB, 1-Pixel, smooth shaded, Z, 3D, 1 infinite light)
Texture Pixels/sec 176 Million/s (GMX 2K == 33M/s, fx4 == 70M/s)
(Bilinear, trilinear, or nearest neighbor, 64x64, smooth)
Viewperf Benchmark (SGI unofficial AFAIK)
SGI Intergr Dell/Oxy HP PII 450
320 Wildcat GMX 2K fx6
Benchmark $4-5K $8K $4.5K $9.5K
CDRS-04 200 178 130 N/A
DX-04 18.17 32 20 26
DRV-05 13.12 17 13 N/A
Light 02 1.75 3.14 2.56 2.87
(1280x1024)
What I read from this is that the SGI is neither in a price or
performance niche. The are at least equal (and in most cases better)
in price/performance (and I've pick about the best case for the
price/performance for the competitors). The were Wildcat and fx6
configurations listed in the $12-31K range (ouch!) with only
marginally better results.
Three important notes.
(1) Standard equipment. None of the other systems listed have
firewire/video-io built in -- some of the competing benchmark configs
have only 64MB, some may not include 100BaseT networking. Some may not
be expandable to 2 procs.
(2) Viewperf doesn't specify quality parameters -- this can (and has)
allowed poorer quality image to have numerical supremacy, but with
compromised visual results. Graphics have to be seen.
(3) the 2D (plain old WinStone et. al.) perfomance of these 3D cards
is suspect at best. Most of the all out 3D cards have mediocre 2D
performance (for stuff like Office, Photoshop, etc.). SGI VW 320 have (as mentioned in the launch) some record breaking 2D.... you should have seen the 75MB photoshop file they were dragging around.
for details on the viewperf #'s see:
spec.org
spec.org
JMHO
john zulauf |
