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

To: ramin shahidi who wrote (5510)	1/10/1999 2:36:00 AM
From: Eli Lauris	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14451

<<The Market.. With such price range, SGI certainly can not reach Homes, or normal office staffs, managers,etc... The "left-overs!" consist of a very low percentage of the market, that are mainly engineers, designers, animators, maybe architects, imaging specialists, etc.. >> Ramin, Do the math. This "left-over" market is currently about 2.5 million NT machines + 0.5 million UNIX machines sold per year. The NT market is growing at 30%+ a year, while UNIX workstation market is declining at 5-10% a year. If SGI can capture, say, 30% of the NT workstation market, that's 750,000 units a year. Assuming, say, $5000 average price, that's $3.5 billion a year in revenue. Just for comparison, that's more than SGI's ENTIRE revenue for the past year including all the workstations, servers and supercomputers.

To: ramin shahidi who wrote (5510)	1/11/1999 1:38:00 PM
From: Alexis Cousein	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14451

> The base price is under $4k (lets say 3.5K) + the 128M RAM probably > is not adequate for the group of end-users this box is targeting, so > you probably need to buy another 256M RAM (not a major expense > though); + VPC does not come with the Fast SCSI HD option! Which you can probably get from anyone for 300$ max. (if you want Ultra2SCSI PCI64 etc. etc.) or cheaper. > which means if you are running NT, you better purchase the fast > SCSI option + the flat panel monitor Sorry, but comparing any system with a system with the Silicon Graphics 1600SW is plain silly. Either you need it (or want it), and then you can't buy an Intergraph Wildcat at all, or you don't, in which case you can compare whatever you like, but a good 17" monitor should be roughly $600. A good 20/21" should be about in the price range you yourself are quoting. > I would estimate the dual > 400-450PII VPC-320 would range something between 10-14K. I fail to see the reasoning, and I'll wager you're off by a large four-digit number. You can buy the Pentium II-450 processors at Fry's if you want to (or do you think SGI has a special non-slot 1 connector?) if you want to, and they just don't cost $3000 a piece, and as SGI is now using a standard off-the-shelf processor, I can't see SGI charging much more than the market price either. Now, for Xeon boxes, esp. those with larger secondary caches, it's a different story, but Intel's pricing applies to everyone in the same manner ;). > With 6-8K price range you have at least two other (open system) NT > options: HP-FX or Intergraph-3D You will have exactly the same issue: at these price points, these will be even more bare-bones than the Silicon Graphics 320 (and of course, will miss many of the features). These systems will be more expensive than the Silicon Graphics 320, no matter how you tweak the numbers. And let's not speak about what it becomes when you need lots of texture memory (which costs an arm and a leg on most platforms). > The "left-overs!" consist of a very low percentage of the market, > that are mainly engineers, designers, animators, maybe architects, > imaging specialists, etc.. Those 'left-overs' are quite a market, and if SGI takes all of those, I wonder how Intergraph will survive. > Integraph has been fighting a losing battle, to make money in this > market, for years. Intergraph has other problems, and I'm sure others can comment on them -- just follow the Intergraph thread to havea sample of them. > SGI's closed graphics sub-system (eventhough it is fantastic) can > only be considered as a disadvantage. No. Of course, I can only substantiate than in a few hours' time ;). > I don't know anybody (in the NT/PC developers society,) that would > prefer to develop on a board that is constrained to a particular > platform. Well, you don't pick your examples well: the HP fx/ line is, AFAIK, only available on HP workstations, and the Intergraph WildCat is not exactly something you can plug into your 440 chipset motherboard with a single 32-bit PCI bus either.