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

To: Marcelo Magnasco who wrote (4903)	5/20/1998 2:10:00 PM
From: Christian Fuhrmann	Respond to of 14451

Marcelo, > It's truly scary that someone from SGI does not understand this. SGI has an internal "Field Feedback"-Process. I forwarded your statement to the appropriate persons. Any further feedback is highly appreciated. Thanks, Christian (working for SGI)

To: Marcelo Magnasco who wrote (4903)	5/20/1998 2:47:00 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14451

Hey Marcelo, What the ^(#! you mean ?? > It's truly scary that someone from SGI does not understand this. Hey Marcelo, What the ^(#! you mean ?? > It's truly scary that someone from SGI does not understand this. Hey Marcelo, What the *^(#! you mean ?? > It's truly scary that someone from SGI does not understand this. TOM, TOM, TOM, Will you SHUTUP and LISTEN. Marcelo is agreeing with what you been saying along. OH! Hey thanx Marcelo for being positive about SGI. REMEMBER, An InteL processor is a terrible thing to infect with a borg virus unless it resides in a system built by SGI in Korea. NO NO that's built in Pakistan. OH.

To: Marcelo Magnasco who wrote (4903)	5/21/1998 12:42:00 PM
From: John M. Zulauf	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14451

> Because many of us have depended on having both high end > and lower end solutions which are compatible with each other. Marcelo, I agree completely -- and from what Rick B has be saying to the press, so does SGI. Let's not forget though that even if in ran IRIX, the Visual PC wouldn't help you here. Remember that any Intel based product release this year will by necessity 32bit. Any hope of compatibility with your 64bit O2000's is thus negated. As a stockholder I wouldn't want SGI spending any time port IRIX back down to 32 bits (and as engineer, I wouldn't want to do it -- icky). As a customer, I think you don't want them distracted from the current and future 64 bit Mips and IA-64 IRIX products. Rick B has said in strong terms that they aren't abandoning the Mips product line or you Marcelo. In the future, IRIX will run on a fully IA-64 product line -- you'll have your compatibility. Until then (and probably a bit after) it appears that SGI will continue to sell, support, and upgrade it's current generation of Mips workstations. I agree with you that O2 and Octane are important products for the high-end customers. They will continue to be upgraded as typical througout an SGI product's life. According to public statements, SGI will continue to develop and release MIPS based products -- and they (more than ever) must push pricing, features, and quality to assure these products are competitive: news.com exerpts: 225MHz Octane 128/4G $19,995 (and what's your discount...) Look's like you're not being abandoned -- and if you're very price conscious the Linux Pentium II's make fine X terminals, or you can "CAD Duo" the Octane for two local users. Here are some exerpts from Rick's April 14th information news.com We will introduce products over the next several years that will continue to leverage the MIPS technology," Belluzzo said. "And we will then have a transition to Intel. "At some point in time, the Intel roadmap will deliver the kind of performance that it takes to meet our needs over the long term, so we will transition to Intel completely. But there is a long path to getting there," he said in an interview. I think both you and the stockholders would be most put out at them if they were to delay the IA-64 product line in order to try and fit IRIX into the VisualPC. That's not to say that the VisualPC won't be important to many (and many new) SGI customers -- it's just that for the high-end customers, the transition to Intel won't make sense until the IA-64 (Merced) products ship. Don't ask me when, if I knew, I'd have to shoot myself ;-) However, given the earliest public statements regarding Intel and SGI date from Sept 97, that the Merced isn't supposed to ship until 2H99, and the 18-24 month schedule for new products, my guess (and my hope) is that SGI will be ready (with at least a first product) when Intel is. > If I have to start putting 1.5K$ PentiumII Linux boxen on intern's The 1.5K Pent's aren't going to have the graphics, bandwidth, CPU rate L2 cache size or max memory of the Octane. They'll also be 32bit. An 8K PII properly equipped might be able to match the Octane graphics in NT. However, OpenGL accelaration for Linux is spotty at best. Most of the best board mfg's don't see the ROI for writing the drivers and aren't incredibly interested in publishing there internal interface to the Xfree crowd. > Hell, I can get 1K$ P-II boxen now. I can network 20 of them > together with 100BT, run RPI, and get something approaching decent > performance for the kinds of jobs we run here, for 20K$. Some classes of problems are suited to that topology -- but are you sure the next algorithm you need to solve will be? Are you willing to put in the time and money into the tuning that will be required. Last I checked, efficient, automated use of slowly connected clusters is still a subject of PhD theses. My guess is that you went with the O2000 to avoid this real hassles and expenditures in the first place. My belief is that by the time you need to replace your O2000, SGI will have a full IA-64 product line addressing your requirements, and that until then they will continue to support the Mips/IRIX base. I agree that it would be great to have a low cost 64 bit Intel workstation from SGI running IRIX -- but I'm afraid we're waiting on Intel for the processor... unofficialy, john