SGI: Discussion

I got email from them today telling me how awesome they are going to be. I wanted to say, "Prove your love. Send me a Tezro."

PymbleSoftware wrote: They canned Origin a couple of years ago.

No, that was the other SGI. This SGI just put it back into the sales lit

Looks kind of like a minnow swallowed a shark, became the shark. We know the other guys were losers, the new ones might be better. Let's hope for the best and cut them some slack for a while. (Dual-core 1 ghz R18K solder-in replacement come on baaaby !!)

Maybe they do actually want to use the Origin name again. The question is: for what product?
Make the Altix line Xeon based and a new Itanium based Origin? Or name the vue box(x?)es Origin. We'll see.

clavileno wrote: The one thing I'm most impressed by in all of this is that SGI (the outgoing one) managed to find a company to purchase it which actually shared one of the key competitive differentiators SGI had in the marketplace: Rackable, like SGI, don't put any bloody prices on their website .

Is it really so difficult for these companies to download a copy of OSCommerce, Freeway or whatever and knock up a pricing matrix? If I want to buy a server, I want to buy a server, not engage in "a sales process". If Rackable can't offer that, I'll just click on through to another vendor who can offer that for me.

Utterly farcical.

They don't want you to buy a server. They want you to buy a room full of servers, at which point you wouldn't want the price on the website. That said...they could still give you a price on the website so you knew where to begin your budget.

mapesdhs wrote: At 1.66GHz, the Itanium2 is perfectly capable of being 100% faster than a 3GHz XEON 5460

Yeah, but I can buy a dozen XEONs for the price of one Itanium2, so the FLOPS/$$$ ratio is still miserable.

jan-jaap wrote: Yeah, but I can buy a dozen XEONs for the price of one Itanium2, so the FLOPS/$$$ ratio is still miserable.

And your XEON shared memory system is where, exactly?

Point is, for those codes that benefit from the arch, Altix 4K is a good system. i7 will be better though, and as you say cheaper.

Ian.

mapesdhs wrote: I'm getting a bit sick of seeing the Itanic label. IA64 is actually a decent CPU these days. The orig release was
poor, but ... not now ...

You have to look at Itanium in the context it was originally portrayed. Back around 1999, someone from Intel gave a presentation that described how this amazing wunder-CPU would eventually completely replace x86 32-bit in PC server and home systems. The graph projected something like 29 million units per annum just a few years later. And just about every major OS at the time would run on it (Windows, Solaris, Tru64, AIX/SCO/Sequent, IRIX, etc). The reality is that close to a decade later, that x86 is still being designed/manufactured and is selling, x64 won the home 64-bit market, and a significant part of the server market, and the number of units shipped per year has never come anywhere near what was originally hoped for. "Mission Accomplished" eh

EDIT: fixed typos

mapesdhs wrote: And your XEON shared memory system is where, exactly?

And the benchmarks for the Altrix 4K are where, exactly? Your site lists results for 1 or 2 CPU IA64 workstations.

As a product, Itanium is a failure. It was meant to take over the server/workstation world and it didn't. Hence the nickname.

If you desperately need a large shared memory system you might go for an Altrix 4K regardless of the CPUs, but IA64 for single or dual CPU workstations? You have to be mad to buy one of those in 2009.

Are there any Itanium workstations on the market these days? The whole idea ended with the zx6000, didn't it?

Even NASA does not see the need for Itanic any more as their latest 20,480-core SGI system will have Xeons in it:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/06/sgi_moon_nasa/