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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Jackson who wrote (80837)	11/23/1999 9:13:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573092

Billy Jack - Re: "It is quite obvious that Intel has tried to stack the deck in favor of DEADDRAM....and failed to fool anyone. I expect the DEADRATS to start to flee the DEADRAM ship prior to sinking" "Intel's new 840 chip set provides most of the internal data transfer speed advantages that SGI worked for more than two years to add to its first Intel-based PC. " Looks like Intel fooled SGI. Paul {==============================} SGI abandons key plan for workstations By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com November 23, 1999, 5:35 p.m. PT URL: news.cnet.com SGI once again has changed its strategy with its Intel-based Visual Workstation line and is backing off from a decision to transfer the division to another company. The struggling hardware maker announcedin August that it would seek a partner to take over the product line. But in October, SGI said it hadn't succeeded in finding a partner. Now SGI plans to keep the product line under its own roof but drastically reduce the amount of refinements the company adds, said Geoff Stedman, marketing director for the line. "The reality is that you don't have to totally redesign the wheel in some markets," Stedman said in an interview. "The new approach going forward will be to embrace more of a standard platform and add value on top of that." The demise of SGI's Visual Workstation 320 and 540 models marks the end of a grand attempt to bring the special-purpose, expensive hardware of the Unix workstation realm into the more price-conscious market of Intel-based workstations running Windows NT. Though the products were well regarded, they were hobbled by delays, manufacturing difficulties and a poorly developed means to distribute and sell the machines, SGI has said. Now, SGI's next-generation Intel machines, due in the second quarter of 2000, will limit SGI's additions to the graphics card, he said. The company will build the card around a chip from Nvidia designed with the help of about 50 engineers SGI transferred to Nvidia as part of SGI's August reorganization, Stedman said. SGI acknowledges that all the changes have left potential buyers uncertain. "I still think we have to prove ourselves from an execution standpoint," Stedman said. With the delays, the ever-advancing PC technology caught up with SGI's expertise, Stedman said. Intel's new 840 chip set provides most of the internal data transfer speed advantages that SGI worked for more than two years to add to its first Intel-based PC. Because SGI couldn't find a partner to take over the Visual Workstation line, the company decided to cancel the 320 and 540 models of its Visual Workstation line. The decision cost $40 million for the cancellation of manufacturing contracts and $20 million for excess inventory, the company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week. It's not the only difficulties SGI has had executing its August reorganization plan. The company also has been trying to sell off its Cray Research supercomputing division for more than three months, but despite having a financial partner for months, negotiations still haven't come to fruition. As previously reported, SGI also will try to take advantage of the Linux movement with its new Intel-based workstations, Stedman said. The strategy parallels the one SGI is taking with its higher-end servers. Linux gives "Unix-like capability at much lower price points," he said. Stedman acknowledges that the software support for Linux workstations is thin right now, but believes it will become more vigorous as Linux catches on. Right now, Linux for workstations is popular chiefly in the government and educational markets, where users tend to write their own software, he said. In the longer term, mechanical design and digital content creation software companies are interested in Linux, he said. SGI will try to back up the graphics workstation fundamentals for Linux by releasing some of its OpenGL graphics software into the open-source community, Stedman said. The new machines will be sold largely by resellers instead of by SGI itself, Stedman said. To that end, SGI signed a deal with distributor Ingram Micro last week that SGI believes will get the company access to many resellers, companies that typically spruce up, customize and often assemble computers according to customers' preferences. That method contrasts with the direct sales method preferred by Dell, the company that became the top seller of Intel-based workstations in the third quarter of 1999, according to International Data Corporation figures. Dell, with 27 percent of the worldwide market, passed Hewlett-Packard, which had 24 percent. SGI, while planning eventually to move to Intel chips and the Linux operating system, is keeping its MIPS chip line and Irix version of Unix around through at least 2006. Next year, SGI will produce successors to the low-end R5000 and the high-end R12000 chips that currently power its Unix-based Oxygen and Octane workstations, Stedman said. Go to Front Door \| Enterprise Computing \| Search \| Short takes \| One Week View