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

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (5796)	3/2/1999 12:51:00 AM
From: Jim Davison	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14451

"It's Alive!" The Pentium III machine, shipping immediately for an extra $750, has automatically rendered first-generation visual PC's obsolete. This would certainly explain why SGI might be reluctant to ship machines it would immediately have to upgrade. sgi.com --JD

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (5796)	3/2/1999 1:05:00 AM
From: Eli Lauris	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14451

According to SGI's press release sgi.com, PIII 450Mhz has 15-30% better performance than PII 450 Mhz on 320. I'm not sure exactly what you meant by SGI "delaying 320 until PIII came out". The 320 machine starting shipping Feb 4, i.e. 3 weeks BEFORE PIII came out. It's possible, though, that many potential customers, not knowing the performance, price differential and upgradability options between PII and PIII, may have delayed the purchases until PIII came out.

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (5796)	3/2/1999 9:39:00 PM
From: Kirk Vanden	Respond to of 14451

Tom, >> 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. Yes, the apps that I saw were ones that I had previously seen run on other SGI machines. The visual PC obviously looked much much better than the current O2 graphics. The SGI engineer confirmed the Vis PC had faster graphics than the O2, especially in pixel fill rates. I have seen these demos run on our current few year old Onyx machine and I thought the visual PC was darn impressive. I also saw the visual PC handle a 50 MB satellite image with no problem. You could move it all around the screen with the mouse with absolute ease. The SGI engineer said on bigger memory Vis PCs he has personally done this with 800 MB graphics images. The computer can obviously move the data around REAL fast. I saw about 5 demos that were ported from their UNIX line. All were impressive. One of these was the one that he ran at 60 frames per second for me so I could see that there was no ghosting on the monitors. Of course the fact it could run a graphical demo with texture maps at 60 frames a second was impressive also. The SGI engineer showed me a demo written by another company that did an animation of moving through the streets of Los Angeles with the mouse. The Vis PC was handling 70-80 DIFFERENT texture maps all at the same time. The only time the small crowd kind of boo'd the machine is when it booted up NT instead of Linux. We had been hoping to see the Linux Kernel running on it, but they didn't bring a machine with it loaded. Kirk

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (5796)	3/8/1999 6:53:00 AM
From: Alexis Cousein	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14451

> SGI did not know sooner that the P3 would give a > lackluster performance improvement???? For running a spreadsheet, yes. But the PIII, if you have drivers that use the SIMD instructions does help a lot for the non-Cobalt part of the OpenGL pipeline, and for imaging and DirectShow/Quicktime components, even at the same clock speeds. Due to the market focus of these boxes, the PIII is actually more interesting than on an office application box. For an example, check out sgi.com When using an Intel Pentium III 450MHz processor over an Intel Pentium II 450MHz processor, the Silicon Graphics 320 visual workstation posted a 15 to 30 percent benchmark improvement in most GLPerf and ViewPerf dataset benchmarks. The Pentium III 500MHz processor has delivered approximately 10 percent additional performance on top of this result. If you have an applications for which OpenGL operations are CPU-bound with a Cobalt chipset, 40% is nothing to sneer at.