Submitted by “There is a saying that one year in IT industries is equal to 8 years in traditional industries. One year ago I wrote an article about the workstation market, if I compare this article to the situation today, quite everything has changed in this pretty short period of time. So now it’s time for an update.”
While kloty mentions that ISV’s aren’t porting their software to Solaris x86, he fails to mention what software in particular. His comment “it is not a workstation platform with the bright variety of software.” means what exactly? And what software is he using in this “comparison” to judge whether a particular platform is a “good workstation”?
Hi Robert,
what I mean is eg. EDA software like First Encounter from Cadence or MCAD software like Catia. This software is typical for a workstation usage and it’s widely used on Solaris/SPARC, but not on Solaris/x86.
Regards,
Anton
In both cases that is some pretty specialized stuff, not disimilar to some of tools used by our GIS people where the most popular platforms get it and some don’t. It’s like Linux, if enough people clamor for it, they will eventually write/port it.
As the owner of a SGI O2 and an Orgin2000 “deskside” I for one am sorry to see SGI go. The author of this article is so true. When you compare current “wintel” workstations to the RISC/UNIX workstations of the past, there is no comparison. SGIs were built to last.
The software, which has been running on these workstations [SGI MIPS] can be used on SGI PRIZM series without further modification or recompilation.
Interesting. Does this mean that either Itanium is inherently MIPS compatible/has a hardware emulation layer, IRIX on Itanium implements a software emulation layer, or IRIX’ API is exactly the same on both machines?
SGI ships Transitive QuickTransit, which can run IRIX/MIPS apps on Linux/IA-64.
I’m a bit confused by the defenition given for “workstation.” Eight years ago I was running 3DStudio Max 2.0 on Pentium Pro and Pentium 2s running NT 4.0. Those machines only had a few hundred megs of ram. I got “work” done. Hence the name workstation.
Today I run Softimage XSI under 32bit Windows. I still get “work” done.
Come to think of it, that’s kinda sad. Eight years and I’m still basically using the same OS. I agree, time for an update.
Inreresting review, but the author seems that he does not know the Apple case well enough to talk about it.
“there is no professional software ported to the new architecture (expect software, which is developed by Apple itself). ”
Wrong, what about Cinema4D, LightWave, TecPlot, Ensight, Harpoon, Xpress, Mathematica, Maple, Modo, Gridgen, IDL, DataTAnk, TetrUSS, Elmer, Avid suite, a lot of audio production softwares, etc, etc….
And more to come soon: Adobe suite, UGS NX, Maltlab, Maya and much more.
“it also remains unclear if the new Creative Suite version which includes the most important programs like Photoshop will support both architectures, or only the Intel one.”
Wrong, Adobe clearly stated that they will provide a Universal binary of their products, so for both intel and powerpc.
http://www.adobe.com/products/pdfs/intelmacsupport.pdf
“Current policy of Apple is quite radical one, when an Intel model of Mac is available, the equivalent PowerPC system gets discontinued. Maybe this is OK for home users, but certainly not for professionals, who cannot migrate overnight and still need PowerPC based systems as a replacement for broken ones.”
Wrong again, this is true for the home users computers and laptops that Apple sells, but for desktop pro machines and servers both are still available for purchase. IT IS STILL POSSIBLE to buy either powermacs G5 or Xserve G5.
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wo/…
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wo/…
Ahhhh. I was wondering when the bitter/agressive Mac fanatic would show up guns blazing. We can all relax now and ignore them as usual.
What’s the problem? I don’t see where i am agressive. I think i have the right to correct misleading or inaccurate informations. Moreover anyone pretending writing any article which is supposed to be informative needs to take care on the accuracy of the information that he/she is providing. Otherwise its is simply not professional and not worth reading. Therefore i think that being critical or tough is what the author deserves.
The article clearly had several incorrect statements about Apple and the intel transition, so what’s wrong to correct them?
This is so common in all forums recently. Whenever someone tries to provide an accurate information about something related to Apple is accused to be a mac fanboy or mac fanatic. You don’t like the truth, then just keep sleeping, don’t go outside and keep living in your windows/Linux fanatic world.
You treat me of a mac fanatic so i guess i should treat you of linux/windows/whatever fanatic too, isn’t it. It works like this in the trolls forums, right?
“I’m a bit confused by the defenition given for “workstation.” Eight years ago I was running 3DStudio Max 2.0 on Pentium Pro and Pentium 2s running NT 4.0. Those machines only had a few hundred megs of ram. I got “work” done. Hence the name workstation.”
This may be true, but back in that day, the sgis were running 2-4 processors and 1-4 GB of ram on a 64bit processor. A true workstation (by this author’s deffinition) is simply a server packeged in a desk(top/side) package that has a spiffy video card. Look at Discreet’s high end video packages. They just recently ported them to Linux. And then they only run on AMD64. I encourage you to spend $150 some time and pick up a peice of history and buy an old Sgi O2 or Octane. Some of these beasts are amazing. Some (like the O2) even have dedicated video encoding. These things are so powerful that their only starting be be replaced with Linux systems. Last I checked to get the highest end software from Discreet still required getting a tezro from sgi.