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

To: ramin shahidi who wrote (5526)	1/11/1999 8:47:00 PM
From: Jojo Mosko	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14451

"Is SGI going after a niche market again? Tell me I'm wrong. " Hi Ramin, No hard feelings please. Looks like a lot of misunderstanding is going on regarding the new workstations. First, they are not, repeat: not intended to the home PC market. SGI has made it pretty clear that it is targeting professionals in the technical computing area (CAD, CAM, VisSim, Media creation, etc.) Is this a niche ? Well, in terms of unit volumes, it is a niche compared to the home PC market, but it is certainly not a niche compared to the current SGI volume of less than 100,000 machines / year. Looking at it from the price point: these 4K - 8K dollar machines (depending on config) are replacing machines that cost ~4 times as much (e.g. Octanes), and if you look at "comparable" high end PCs, then you should consider that just a high-end graphic card like the Intergraph Wildcat costs like the whole SGI 320 system or more. Regarding the performance of these machines: I heard they will have some record performance in some intensive graphics benchmarks (e.g. the first Intel hardware to hit the 200 mark ViewPerf CDRS) however, this is not the main reason why professionals would buy them. It is some of their unique capabilities like being able to map 4 streams of video in real-time into texturing memory, or having "unlimited" amount of texture memory due to the UMA architecture (no separate "graphic" memory but rather the main memory of the machine is shared by the graphics engine). Add to this the completely digital display (no analog signal), the much faster I/O (6 times PCI speeds, I'm told) and as a result for some applications these machines would not just be "faster" they would simply be able to do what no other Intel workstation can do at any price. I've seen some demos on these machines and I must say that nothing else I've ever seen on the desktop (and I've seen 60,000K workstations) comes to this price performance or even close. This is not about reading a "fact sheet". You have to see them in real life to understand the value. Comparing them to a Dell with a high-end graphics card based on a data-sheet is missing the whole point. Go see a demo, and them share your experience. Summary: - A volume "niche" compared to home PC, but a great opportunity for SGI to expand its current limited volumes significantly - Machines that can do what no other machine in this market can do today - Machines that do graphics and I/O at significantly better price/performance than what exists today in this market. I hope this explains the "niche" issue.

To: ramin shahidi who wrote (5526)	1/12/1999 1:56:00 PM
From: John M. Zulauf	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14451

A niche, we should all have such a niche... AFAIK the so called niche market that SGI is pursuing is bigger than all of it's workstation markets to date. Now if they were just releasing something like HP's $12-31K FX6 box that's a niche. Clearly the Silicon Graphics Visual Workstations aren't Bob-in-accouting-needs-Excel-and-Word boxes. These are going for less than $1000, and don't have anything to do with SGI strength's advantages, assets, and core competancies. For those of who face challenging 2D and 3D graphics everyday from whistle to whistle -- these are the kind boxes we've been waiting for -- at a price we can justify to management. From a post of mine to Yahoo Silicon Graphic Visual Workstation benchmarks See: sgi.com (apparently one of these is some kind of record) Benchmark Result High-End Winstone 99 29 High-End Graphics WinBench 99 310 High-End Disk WinBench 99 14,900 Business Winstone 99 30.7 Business Graphics WinBench 99 160 Tri Strip (Tmesh) 4.16 Million/s (RGB, 25-Pixel, smooth shaded, Z, 3D, 1 infinite light) Tri Fill 7.39 Million/s (RGB, 1-Pixel, smooth shaded, Z, 3D, 1 infinite light) Texture Pixels/sec 176 Million/s (GMX 2K == 33M/s, fx4 == 70M/s) (Bilinear, trilinear, or nearest neighbor, 64x64, smooth) Viewperf Benchmark (SGI unofficial AFAIK) SGI Intergr Dell/Oxy HP PII 450 320 Wildcat GMX 2K fx6 Benchmark $4-5K $8K $4.5K $9.5K CDRS-04 200 178 130 N/A DX-04 18.17 32 20 26 DRV-05 13.12 17 13 N/A Light 02 1.75 3.14 2.56 2.87 (1280x1024) What I read from this is that the SGI is neither in a price or performance niche. The are at least equal (and in most cases better) in price/performance (and I've pick about the best case for the price/performance for the competitors). The were Wildcat and fx6 configurations listed in the $12-31K range (ouch!) with only marginally better results. Three important notes. (1) Standard equipment. None of the other systems listed have firewire/video-io built in -- some of the competing benchmark configs have only 64MB, some may not include 100BaseT networking. Some may not be expandable to 2 procs. (2) Viewperf doesn't specify quality parameters -- this can (and has) allowed poorer quality image to have numerical supremacy, but with compromised visual results. Graphics have to be seen. (3) the 2D (plain old WinStone et. al.) perfomance of these 3D cards is suspect at best. Most of the all out 3D cards have mediocre 2D performance (for stuff like Office, Photoshop, etc.). SGI VW 320 have (as mentioned in the launch) some record breaking 2D.... you should have seen the 75MB photoshop file they were dragging around. for details on the viewperf #'s see: spec.org spec.org JMHO john zulauf