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

To: Justin Banks who wrote (4358)	2/10/1998 9:31:00 PM
From: Larry Brew	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14451

All,I'm going to become SGI's CPRO 'chief public relations officer:-) I missed posting some very good pr on SGI that deserved posted. I'm going to try and keep the thread updated from now on. I do believe SGI is taking it's problems head on, and will excel. Below is not one of the best, but good info: INTERVIEW-Silicon sees NT PCs in 2nd half February 9, 1998 07:15 AM By Christina Toh-Pantin KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 9 (Reuters) - U.S. high-end computer maker Silicon Graphics Inc SGI expects to roll out new personal computers based on the Windows NT operating system in the second half of 1998, a senior executive said on Monday. Bob Bishop, chairman of the company's non-U.S. manufacturing division, told Reuters in an interview the introduction of the new products would be "in the second half of the calendar year." He was speaking during a visit to the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur for a meeting of international advisers to the Multimedia Super Corridor, a testbed for multimedia applications. Silicon Graphics, based in Mountain View, California, is known for powerful, large computers popular with engineers, designers and movie special-effects artists. The company is now making a major business strategy shift into the high-powered, but less expensive personal computers (PCs) based on Microsoft Corp MSFT Windows NT software standard. It has had a string of disappointing financial results in the past two years as its customers shifted to the Windows NT PCs. Asked about the firm's outlook, Bishop said: "The guidance we've given them (analysts) is that this fiscal year will be flat with respect to revenues, but we will achieve a break-even status this fiscal year. Next fiscal year, however, beginning July 1, we do expect to see our revenues and profits regaining considerable momentum." In the second quarter ended December 31, 1997, Silicon Graphics reported a net loss of $31.48 million versus a loss of $12.80 million in the corresponding year-ago quarter. The loss in the most recent second quarter included $53 million in restructuring and acquisition-related charges. Bishop said Silicon Graphics did not intend to go head-to-head with much cheaper PCs being made by its rivals. "It's not our intention to play in the sub-$1,000 market," he said. "But it is our intention to bring to the PC market a level of visualisation performances they have not had before." Silicon Graphics is a key maker of Unix operating system products, which is under threat from Windows NT. But Bishop said Silicon was not turning its back on Unix products. Windows NT computers mostly use Intel Corp INTC processors. "We believe the world will be a hybrid of Unix and NT for some time to come," Bishop said. "Our intention is to be very focused and very strong in the technical market place, which is where we came from and where our roots are." He said the company had no plans to do away with its MIPS microprocessor unit, even though the new business strategy involved Windows NT machines that operate on Intel Pentiums. "MIPS becomes an ongoing product for our server product," he said. ************************************************************** There was another good one about SGI and MSFT working on 3D. If I stumble across it again, I'll post. Larry

To: Justin Banks who wrote (4358)	2/11/1998 12:43:00 PM
From: Patrick Gainer	Respond to of 14451

Justin Banks writes: "My point was that two almost completely identical DG AViion systems (on the 100GB db), went from 528.6 using Oracle 8.03 to 1135.7 using Oracle 8.04. Because we're running 8.03, we can obviously expect a similar speedup. That would put the same Origin @ 1718.6 on the 100GB DB. I'll not speculate on the 300GB results, as I don't think it will be long until you'll see some. Sorry I didn't explain myself well, but I think the numbers will increase for SGI in much the same way that they did for DG when the 8.04 numbers are available. This would seem to indicate that the SGI system is indeed faster." I was confused at first by this message because I have done extensive database performance work with several different database companies and I have also done lots of hardware and OS performance work, all in a previous life and I have NEVER seen a 100% increase in DBMS performance, when moving from release x.y.z to x.y.z+1, especially in a mature product. Then I went to the TPC web site and I noticed the DBMS release wasn't the only difference between the two numbers (528 and 1135). The higher number was also run on a machine with processors having double the L2 cache size of the lower number. So at the very least, one must admit it is not possible, from the available evidence to conclude the Oracle code was solely responsible for the increase and hence it is not likely that SGI will experience a two times speedup changing only the DBMS source. Further, it is fine to say you have no experience running tpc-d but that is no excuse for a lousy number. When SGI ran their tpc-c numbers with Informix, they had a huge amount of help and expertise provided by Informix as Informix wanted the tpc-c numbers to look as good as possible. Are you implying Oracle wasn't as interested in what you produced? There was nobody from Oracle helping out? And if scalability of these systems is such a selling feature, why bother with 8-way numbers at all, especially if they aren't very good? Why not do a 32-way number and blow everyone away? Pat