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Technology Stocks : Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI)

SGI 91.07

-0.9%

Dec 8 3:59 PM EST

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To: Sultan who wrote (5793)	3/1/1999 8:33:00 PM
From: Kirk Vanden	Read Replies (2) of 14451

I was able to see an up close demo of the Visual PC running NT last Friday. Below are a few of my observations and some information a SGI System Engineer told me in response to alot of questions I had. 1.) I was very impressed with the graphics. Nothing can touch it in this area. Just darn impressive for a sub 10K Windows NT machine. (the machine I saw had a single 350 Mhz Pentium II and 512 MB of memory, and of course a flat panel display). SGI has just done a superb job here. The Cobalt graphics ASICs are real powerful. This frees up the CPU to do other things. 2.) I asked about PCI bus design flaws being responsible for the slow shipping. I was told the real reason is that SGI wanted to wait until the Pentium III became available to ship. I even asked the SGI engineer very clearly once again if the PCI bus problems were true. He said this was not the case. I'm afraid I wasn't convinced with the waiting for Pentium III response. If SGI already had orders for the Pentium II why delay cash flow for something the customers were not expecting in the first place. The comment that caught my attention is when the SGI Engineer attempted to say that SGI was having trouble getting Xeon CPUs from Intel. He said even Intergraph was having problems getting supply so this was a normal industry wide thing, and that the VW not shipping yet was easily explained. But, isn't Intergraph having legal disputes with Intel and isn't/wasn't Intel holding back supply on purpose. I just thought it strange that the SGI engineer would compare SGIs Xeon CPU supply problems with that of Integraph. So what is it ? CPU supply problems or waiting for the PIII ? Never got him to clarify why exactly the VWs were not shipping yet. 3.) The flat panel was awe inspiring as Tom has pointed out. I saw a 60 frames per second animation with no ghost images. The pure digital data path really shines here. I asked about quality control issues with the flat panels. SGI said they ship them with no more than 8 bad pixels. Only 3 of the bad ones can be green, and no more than 5 can be red. Basically tight standards for such a big screen. The SGI engineer said only one bad pixel has ever caught his eye in seeing 27 monitors. Apparently each panel would cost 35K if they were all perfect. Mitsubishi makes the flat panels for SGI. 4.) The Visual PCs don't have a conventional BIOS. The have an advanced ARC-PROM has one nice advantage. It becomes almost trivial to set it up to boot from any number of operating systems. This can be user specified. You can tell it what OS image to boot from what device. Dual booting NT and Linux probably won't require LILO or LOADLIN for example, if I understood the SGI engineer correctly. 5.) SGI is participating with over 2 dozen open source and Linux committees/groups already to get Linux ported to it with full X Windows and Cobalt support. I was surprised at the 2 dozen number, but that is what he said. SGI won't release important proprietary Cobalt information but the SGI engineer said they will be possibly be providing the Linux community with a set of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to access the hardware. The SGI engineer said that the VW developers were taking their machines home over the weekend to work on porting the Linux Kernel all during the development of the VW. I guess that is why Linux Kernel support appeared so fast. Anyone else have more info on this ? I didn't get a chance to clarify or expand on my Linux questions very much. But he said expect to see a distribution in 60-90 days that fully supports all of the VW hardware. Guess I've hit the main points. Anyone else see demos or quiz SGI engineers ? Interesting to see if what I was told was just one engineer's opinion or what other people are hearing about the VW as well. Would I use my own money to buy one for home. Yes, no question about that. Awesome machine, even running that NT virus. The only major annoyance is that darn plastic case. Didn't appear to have much room to install a CD writer or internal ZIP drive. Not many front facing bays. Kirk

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