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Technology Stocks : Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Justin Banks who wrote (3192)	10/26/1997 1:32:00 AM
From: Esvida	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14451

Sorry that I might have offended you for referring to MIPS as baggage. Good technology is one thing, but good business is another. They don't always go together. They key thing to look at is the ROI. Did the MIPS investment really pay off for SGI? Many years ago I was in the Motorola camp for the 68K chips. I was so lost why Intel kept beating out Motorola. I'm almost certain that you can also find a few ex-SGI who may not say nice things about their old company. People are entitled to their opinions, but as far as I know the SGI people are extremely talented and hard working. If some kind of structured management is needed for a business thrive and if the SGI people can handle that, I suspect that they will do well. What you say about throwing rocks may be right and the effects of that may be finally showing. Blaming marketing is a cheap escape and it is not a new practice. Companies resorting to this usually find themselves in a quagmire for a long long time. Here I may have to plead guilty of ignorance of the free sprit at SGI. -Al

To: Justin Banks who wrote (3192)	10/28/1997 8:05:00 PM
From: Patrick Gainer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14451

"Several things are worth noting here. MIPS is a much more successful chip arch. than Sparc is. Sparc has lately been selling vapor. A 600mhz CPU is about as likely to come out of Sun in the next year as MSFT is to be bought by Netscape. Not too long, and the 300Mhz R12k will appear, with specInt numbers comparable to 600mhz Alpha, and specFP numbers better than 600mhz Alpha." Justin, I realize you work for SGI but this response is just fraught with nonsense. MIPS is a sucessful embedded processor. And this has nothing to due with SGI. It is because of the (largely Japanese) companies building and marketing MIPS processors in that space. I respectfully suggest that if left to SGI, MIPS probably wouldn't be a successful architecture. SGI has had an utterly dismal track record with the R10k. First, it was late. Then, as a result, it had mediocre integer performance. Embarassingly, the other vendors using the chip (like SNI) actually got better integer performance than SGI, suggesting SGI's compiler technology was second rate. Finally, SGI announced the 275 MHz R10K in Jan 1996 and has yet to ship a part over 200 MHz. Which makes me think the R12K you refer to is that effort. And when you talk about being competitive with the 600 MHz Alpha, you are, no doubt, referring to the 21164, which is DEC's equivalent of the R10k. There is zero chance the R12k @ 300 MHz will be competitive with the 21264, due in the first half of 1998 and likely to be at least twice as fast as the 300 MHz R12K. The facts are that SGI has slipped (like everyone else) behind DEC in the processor race and are not likely to catch up. Finally, your comments regarding SPARC are absurd. Sun has had faster boxes than SGI when measured using any integer or commercial benchmark since the introduction of the UltraSPARC. Pat