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To: Kirk Vanden who wrote (5794)	3/1/1999 11:29:00 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 14451

Good commentary, but I think waiting for a more expensive Pentium three with it's reported wow of 10% increase in performance at what cost up was not very good business in terms of generating revenue. SGI did not know sooner that the P3 would give a lackluster performance improvement???? What's that word from the oval office?? Ah yes, misleading. But I guess seeing anything run on virus NT-us at what appears to be a reasonable speed is an astounding feat. What did you see that you thought was impressive? Was it an app that you had seen before only running on an O200 and the performance was as good or something similar. Astounding is my impression of Xi Graphics OpenGL demo on a PII 300 running Linux. 5 Apps running on 4 headed O200 and displaying seamlessly on the Linux(100 base-t) box and totally native newave running on the linux box. Tom Watson tosiwme.

To: Kirk Vanden who wrote (5794)	3/3/1999 4:30:00 AM
From: Andrew Walton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14451

Kirk Vandem wrote... 2.) I asked about PCI bus design flaws being responsible for the slow shipping. I was told the real reason is that SGI wanted to wait until the Pentium III became available to ship. I even asked the SGI engineer very clearly once again if the PCI bus problems were true. He said this was not the case. I'm afraid I wasn't convinced with the waiting for Pentium III response. The PCI bus in the 320 is 3.3v, this is in line with the PCI 2.2 specification. The previous PCI specification (2.1) has a 5v bus. Obviously you can't use 5v cards on a 3.3v bus. In fact the connectors have a notch to prevent this. There are some universal cards that can be used with 5v and 3.3v buses. Since most PCI cards are 5v, this puts a restriction on what you can put in your 320. For many people this won't be a problem since the graphics, audio, video, networking, USB and FireWire are on the motherboard. The few cards you may need, such as SCSI, are available as universal cards. Design flaw? No, I don't think so, as far as I know the implementation of PCI on the 320 is in line with the specification. Bad design decision? Possibly, I guess who ever made that choice expected 3.3v or, more likely, universal cards to be much more widespread by now. As for waiting for the PIII, the suggestion that this is the PIII Xeon for the 540 (in a latter post) is much more plausible. Especially since the 320 is shipping.