We've had a couple of conversations with the very affable
Greg Estes, SGI's VP of Corporate Marketing, over the past couple of months. Here they are patched together. Greg talks to us about SGI, Hollywood, tough financial times, Linux, and everything. On related news, SGI now owns a... world record.
Post a Comment
Great interview, but too much marketing spiel. Just let us know how many FPS in Q3Arena the Onyx box dishes out. At HDTV resolutions, of course.
That's what owning an Onyx is all about isn't it?
Playing games ...
I now own a purple Indigo2 R10K/195 with 384 megs of ram, and a SolidImpact graphics board (which is the lowest you could get for 3d, no texture engine).
I love the machine, it's verry fast for it's time. It's just a great, fast, stable machine to work on. I use blender on it a lot, and also play mp3's with it 
It's still running IRIX 6.2, if only i could get my hands on a 6.5 cd set ... it would really make my life a lot easyer.
People at Silicon Graphics were really really creative people back then, and it shows, their machines were waaay ahead of their time, and i'm sure people at SGI now still are.
The I2 for me is a cool machine, because of the way it can do 3D, but it's nothing compared to a decent GF or radeon these days (and i really mean nothing). But besides that it's a verry cool unix box that works verry comfortably. I never had it crash once on me (except for coredumps by netscape).
oh well i could rable on for a while. It just comes down to it that these were great machines ALL ROUND, not only graphically. It definately has great value as a daily UNIX workstation too.
Take Care
p13as3
Seems like they are doing some good work with Linux, getting it to scale on a 64 processor NUMA-based Itanium system 
"SGI Demos 64-Proc Linux Box"
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/09/09/1445238.shtml?tid=139
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2002/september/stream.ht...
SGI recently announced its expanded business strategy in which it will incorporate systems based on the Itanium processor family running Linux into its established line of high-performance computing systems.
If they are regaining their focus, why the Linux on Itanium 2 demo?... What's it going to be, IRIX on MIPS or GNU/Linux on Intel?
As someone who almost worked for sgi's server division (my job offer was rescinded when they went through layoffs last year), I got to see a good amount of their server engineering. My impression is that they put together scalable servers using "bricks." There are router bricks which handle the i/o between the other bricks, cpu bricks (both mips and itanium) that each contain 2-4 cpus plus some local memory, i/o bricks which include pc card slots (such as pci), bricks that contain visualization hardware, etc etc. A server can be changed from MIPS to Intel by changing the cpu bricks from the mips model to the itanium model and then installing Linux over the previous IRIX installation (or vice-versa). So, to answer your question, johnG, they're going with both: mips and itanium.
(fwiw, my interview at sgi was so cool. nowhere else have I almost tripped on a 32-cpu supercomputer.. )
Hmm, the second sentence of his first answer reads:
Unlike our competitors, we only target technical and creative users such as; in the Arts and Sciences We don't target Enterprise users.
Looks garbled but interesting. Could this maybe be fixed?
Right now I have an SGI 1600W Flat Panel
Yeah, mine is now on its 3rd machine, and the 4th is in the mail. Really nice monitor. Too bad they stopped making them...
johnG: If they are regaining their focus, why the Linux on Itanium 2 demo?... What's it going to be, IRIX on MIPS or GNU/Linux on Intel?
It is way different. Linux is an commodity. SGI would earn a lot of savings from it. Itanium could be a commodity one day. MIPS are IRIX can actually pull SGI to its death. Linux on IA32 isn't what they are competing with.
Too bad that no comment/question about the new generation of hardware 3D video acceleration, like ATi Radeon 9700 and yet to be released CineForce from nVidia... I really would like to see some comments of SGI about this thread... maybe next time... =]
I met one of the engineers who developed part of that monitor.
He still has a bunch of them available from his private stock.
I think I still have his contact info at work.
Also look for Deep Video imaging company on the web.
His name is Dan Ebinitzcki (sp?). He is a nice guy.
http://www.actualdepth.com/index3.html
Some info about him
Daniel Evanicky, Chief Technical Officer
Dan Evanicky comes from an extensive background where he possesses a broad knowledge of flat panel displays from 30 years of experience in research and development, design and manufacturing, and processing equipment. He has extensive relationships with Asian display firms and over 40 patents, either granted or in process.
Beginning in the Flat Panel Display industry in 1967, as a LCD Process Engineer for Texas Instruments, Dan has held several leadership positions, including Senior LCD Process Engineer/Research Specialist at Kylex (Division of Exxon Enterprises)/3M, Display Project Manager at Greyhawk Systems, Director of Display Development at Unisys/Dynabrook Technologies, Director of Display Systems at Momenta, Inc and most recently Principal Scientist with SGI.
That's dumb allright, but you should see what other oems do with mass-orders ... compaq is bad, but probably ok. Dell is THE WORST.
Take Care
That was a nice interview. It is good to see some former greats trying to bring back the old glory. Best of luck to them.
Bummer the Cray merger didn't work out better. Two old school companies who make great stuff just couldn't get along. Must have had something to do with the fact that SGI was trying to make Windows workstations as their focus.
I would like to mention that only one company has done well selling intel boxes. That is dell. Everybody else has gotten killed. SGI tried to sell Intel instead of MIPS, and got creamed. Compaq tried to sell intel instead of Alpha, and couldn't survive on their own. Ditto HP. IBM doesn't even make their own anymore, it is all outsourced, and loses money. Seen gateway stock lately?
The problem is that if you don't add technology value to a product than you can't charge more for it than the next guy. And the next guy is always a manufacturing giant who sets up shop in third world countries. You just can't compete with those companies on price.
It is good to see SGI trying to win market by making better products again. And they do have decent products. 1024 processor NUMA sigle OS systems. Nobody else does 1024 processors without clustering, nobody. Did I mention that those processors each draw only like 15W? And how cute is the brick system. Incremental upgrade is so cool.
Hope they survive the next couple of years. If they do expect to see them come back in a big way.
Zenja, you're missing the point. Quake3 FPS is a benchmark for desktop systems. For high-end supercomputers, there are other tools to measure performance.
It's like measuring how good a car is by measuring the power of all its light bulbs. Doesn't make too much sense.
JReZIN, nVidia and ATI are stuff for low-end computers, like graphical workstations.
SGI servers use totally different things to do their 3D. Everything is different. Think, for example, that the internal bandwidth is many orders of magnitude higher than that of a PC.
It's really like, not apples and oranges, but like hot-air baloons and rockets. An SGI server can pull data from a multi-terabyte database and generate 3D images in real-time and let you navigate through that. There's no such thing with a PC.
14. What's on your desktop?
Greg Estes: Right now I have an SGI 1600W Flat Panel and a Dell laptop. The laptop is running NT4 with service pack five. Words can't describe how much I hate it. I'm more of a Mac and IRIX fan. Sales and Marketing people are typically using Windows 2000 or NT.
Why don't they use laptops with Linux? Why don't they use Mac Laptos? If you like Irix, it's much easier using Linux than MS-Windows. Doesn't convince me too much he's an Irix lover 
Florin, I know that, but the technology's changing know... I'm not talking just about the "market" of 3D Acceleration cards, but the market of 3D hardware accelerated rendering with film quality that we're very close...
A new gen card (ATi's Radeon 9700 and to-be-released nVidia's CineForce) can be used to render really _much_ more faster than general propose CPUs around now (it's dedicated propose hardware vs general propose hardware after all...)... I would like to know if SGI'll adopt this new gen hardware in their render-farm/render solutions... and what they think about it too! =]