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Silicon Graphics

Feature: Myth of the Fall of SGI, Part II - the Mystery of Irix 181

Posted by Hemos from the oh-how-the-mighty-are-doing dept.
Thanks to Scott Elyard, who has returned and has written a "second chapter" to his original piece about SGI. Once again he's debunking mysteries, and discussing changes within SGI. Click below to read more.

Myth of the Fall of SGI, Part Two -
the Mystery of IRIX

When I last addressed this topic, more than a year ago, I was hoping to clarify and settle the notion of SGI's supposedly then-imminent demise. I did hope it would work.

However, there is still a peculiar occlusion perceived in SGI's future, particularly by those that do not understand what SGI does; and now, more recently, with SGI's logo change and Linux embrace, the former faithful question SGIs existence as well, possibly because of the recent layoffs (despite a strong quarter for profitability), the corporate image makeover, the MIPS stock divestiture, and the spinning off of Cray and their NT division into separate (but still quite owned) companies.

That these perceptions are still unfounded, and have been unfounded for more than a year, that SGI has posted profit recently, and that SGI continues to be a strong seller of UNIX systems despite the disappointing performance of the NT machines. Some people just can't let go of their own bad ideas. It's like the flat earthers, who continue to insist the earth is not round: I expect to run into people who will continue to insist SGI is going out of business any day now for the next ten years and beyond.

I have, at last, accepted this: that I cannot change everyone's mind with reason or facts. But you can get some of them here.

Common Mistakes and Misinformation That doesn't mean I have to let the FUD slide. Therefore, I have a list of common errors and mistakes people make when discussing SGI.

1. SGI tried to convert customers to Windows NT (or Linux).

This is obviously false, as even the most casual visit to their website shows. OSes supported by SGI are UNICOS (Cray), IRIX (MIPS), Linux (IA32/64), and Windows NT (Visual Workstation).

I find it interesting that anytime SGI adds an OS to its roster of supported platforms (UNICOS, IRIX, Linux, and NT), people assume everything will be rolled over into that one at an unspecified date. This is simply not going to happen. IRIX will remain on their MIPS-based desktop workstations, and it will continue to be upgraded as the best technical high-end UNIX out there.

2. SGI has a gloomy future. (SGI is dying, losing all its customers &c.)

This one's my favorite, simply because it can't be proved or disproved. There's no best response to this one, because it's primarily FUD, since asking for proof is generally ignored.

3. IRIX is being abandoned.

Again, another falsehood. SGI never claimed this, and SGI's IRIX support has actually remained unchanged. The only possible difference is looking like IRIX might not make it to Merced after all. Big deal. I have little faith that porting Solaris to Merced, for example, will do much to Solaris's overall market share.

3a. IRIX is unstable/insecure/unreliable.

I don't think these sorts of comments are relevant. ANY UNIX can be unstable, insecure, and unreliable, so why should IRIX be any different? Competently administered, IRIX is an extremely stable, secure, and reliable UNIX. People seem to forget we still do need people behind the console to keep things working smoothly, and a great deal depends on how well that person knows his or her system and how good she or he is with it.

Like any UNIX, IRIX isn't idiot-proof. Nor is it meant to be; most UNIX operating systems aren't meant to be run by even incredibly smart NASA monkeys, but by competent professionals.

4. Adopting Linux is the sign of a dying, desperate company.

Really? Red Hat must beg to differ. As must, to some extent, IBM, Caldera, Penguin Computing, VA Linux Systems, and indeed any business that has adopted Linux in one form or another as a part of its operating model.

5. SGI's graphics performance isn't cost effective compared with gaming cards for PCs.

I have to raise this issue. Tim Sweeny of Unreal (www.unreal.com) made comments in early July about the future of SGI, and how it doesn't stand a chance against gaming PCs. This is absolutely laughable, and Sweeny ought to have known better than make such statements.

Quoth he on his website: Now, a $2000 Pentium III PC with a Voodoo3 or TNT2 card eclipses the performance of a $30,000 SGI for real-time rendering. The CPU is faster, the fill rate is faster. When I first saw an SGI Reality Engine, my impression was, "Holy cow, I can't believe how much better this is than my '286!" But nowadays, the best 3D games look far cooler than anything you see running on a Reality Engine. When I first read that paragraph, I wondered how a veteran of the game authoring industry could make such a carelessly crafted statement without thinking about it. First, nobody buys an SGI Crimson or Onyx for gaming. Never have, never will. Second, nobody makes games for the SGI--people create games *on* the SGI, not for it, because there would be no point in doing so. Third, I'm nonplussed by the notion of any company in the computer industry has to make as many workstations as Dell makes PCs to stay in business, when the last ten years have shown that you can, and most do.

PCs that have OpenGL cards used primarily for gaming are good a small numbers of polygons, and fast pixel-fill rates. Even on the PC, cards good at large-poly-count geometry transformations tend to suck at pixel-fill (2d) operations (check out any decent card for the PC manufactured by Evans and Sutherland if you dispute this). Why this is even confused with SGI's machines is beyond me, since no PC has even been able to match the aging Reality Engine gfx first made available on the original Onyx in 1994, much less the 88 million polys/second (shaded, textured, and antialiased) of the Infinite Reality on the Onyx, introduced two years later.

But, to the lower end. If you're playing games, you're not buying an SGI. If you're creating them, you're probably not buying an SGI, unless you want to create something along the lines of Myst or Riven, the latter of which was generated on SGI machines running Softimage. But, I have noticed SGI usage popping up in more realtime-oriented titles like Spyro the Dragon (my favorite; from Insomniac Games, check 'em out) for modeling.

Most consumer gaming cards are better than all but the highest-end SGI systems for pixel fill rate. But that's all. The instant anyone needs to transform, rotate, or scale more than a few thousand polygons per second while working with unoptimised geometry (for example, during modeling), any modern SGI will beat any consumer card, period.

Just looking at the behind-the-scenes creation of any major motion picture that involved special effects to any degree reveals that SGI is still the first fallback. Why? Probably because that's where the workstation grew up: in high-demand production environments like ILM, Boss Film Studios, Pixar, and Disney (to say nothing of NASA and other supercomputing institutions nearly everywhere). 6. SGI's new logo is just another example of how SGI is dying.

This one is purely subjective. It's based purely on the espouser's opinion, which I contend is largely useless as a legitimate means of examining a corporation's health.. SGI changing its name to SGI was probably a good move, and I like the new logo only somewhat less than the old one.

To be honest, though, I don't care what the silly thing looks like. I don't see the logo as having much impact on the speed of the systems themselves, the stability of the OS, or the price of tea in China.

This sort of comment reminds me of the people who used to post flames to Usenet about how lame Apple was because they had a fruit for a logo. Yeah. Right.

What's Up Next?

SGI is headed in a different direction than any other UNIX hardware vendor thus far: SGI has actually embraced Linux and promised significant enhancements, enhancements that may actually bring Linux into the realm of viability for some of us.

IRIX is a rock-solid OS, and I cannot imagine using Linux on a production workstation at this point. But, should some fatherly organization pick Linux up, clean it up, and ensure the interface is one I'm familiar with (ksh and Indigo Magic), and applications suddenly find themselves ported to it, I don't see how it would make much of a difference if I don't notice a performance drop.

Obviously, this will take time. Unlike SGI's impending death any second now (two years and still counting, waiting for the big shoe to drop at any moment), it takes time to truly polish an OS and bring it in line with a production effort. My business is 3D graphics. I work with huge files, huge scenes, and immense amounts of data. The aplomb that an SGI running IRIX demonstrates on my workload is unmatched by any other platform or OS, so much so that I have declined purchasing 'faster' PCs and Macintoshes in favor of Indys and Indigos, simply because the responsiveness wasn't there on the PC/Mac hardware with my typical workload tests.

But if Linux can be brought in line on the low-end on SGI hardware with a comparable SGI running IRIX today, and the only real way of telling the difference is to run uname -a at the prompt, who will care?

Certainly not me, or my work.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Feature: Myth of the Fall of SGI, Part II - the Mystery of Irix More

Feature: Myth of the Fall of SGI, Part II - the Mystery of Irix

Comments Filter:
  • Yo. The link to the older story doesn't work.
  • Oy. And now it does. Woo-hoo!
  • The correct URL is http://www.slashdot.org/features/9806090743231.sht ml [slashdot.org].

    Hope this helps.
    --

  • Merill Lynch may know shitloads about stock and what they think the company is doing in the long run, but just because a stock is labelled a "strong sell" doesn't mean the company sucks. From a technical standpoint (the one that, I'd imagine, most /.'ers CARE about), SGI is long from dead. That's what the author is saying. And I completely agree with him. I work in a neuroscience department that uses O2's, Indys, and a challenge for processing huge amounts of image data and dumps statistics based on image analysis and some discrete-logic input. The kinds of simulations they run wouldn't run on a PC or Mac, period. The only thing we get PCs for are sticking the output into a LaTeX or Word document to share with others. I love SGI and what they're doing for the community, as well as the products they've already developed on their own. I don't give a flip what Dean Stanley thinks about them as a business prospect, because I know they'll be around long enough for me. -Chris
  • I had a meeting with a high level marketting person from SGI yesterday, and he said their plans were to phase out IRIX for Linux to the level that they could, and that IRIX had development plans until 2003.

  • Re:Completely baseless, inaccurate analysis (Score:3)

    by Simon Hibbs ( 74836 ) on Thursday September 02, 1999 @04:55AM (#1709638)
    >The notion that SGI is "going out of business"
    >is certainly valid - the company has dropped key
    >divisions and has laid off employees. Added to
    >which, the best people left long ago.

    Just as happened to IBM ten years ago, and six
    years ago, and 3 yeras ago. Obviously signs of
    a faltering and soo-to-die company. Obviously
    it can't have naything to do with streamlining
    operations and concentrating on core competencies.

    The same sort of thing has happened at dozens of
    high profile computer companies at many times in
    the past and no doubt will do so in the future
    too.

    'The best people' is a purely subjective analysis,
    which it's hard to refute. but then it's so vage
    it's hard to take seriously either.

    >This isn't flamebait - there is a reason why people pay Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs to
    >do intelligent research. What you see above sure ain't it.

    And your post is?


    Simon Hibbs
  • I distinctly remember the CEO or President of SGI saying that only 3 Unices would survive; two were Solaris and Linxu, the third I forget (Monterey? AIX?) but it positively was not IRIX. Now this may be the same guy who recently went to M$, or it may not be. But if it was, and that itself presages a change for the better in IRIX's future, then that quick a change for no better reason implies lack of stability at SGI.

    Please, proofread your writing in the future. Several sentences are basically unintelligible except in context. Such lack only implies you were in a hurry, which doesn't help your self proclaimed debunking image.

    --
  • ... That it seems every 3 weeks SGI has been "reinventing itself." Giving one (me) the impression that they don't know what their vision is, or they are thrashing to find a vision that works.

    Also, their press releases seemed to indicate that they were not planning on continuing their line of MIPS systems very long, which *does* translate to dropping IRIX. Of course the truth in the remains to be seen, and is a function of what Merced does...

  • Check out
    this page [slashdot.org] if you're interested in SGI financials. There's been a serious downturn in profitability between 1995 and 1998 which is seriously disconcerting.

    I think a potential strategy of integrating the best of IRIX into Linux would be a winner for SGI. Most people aren't buying SGIs for IRIX, are they? So unloading some of that development cost to the Linux community would be a wise move for them, and making XFS a fully-supported file system for Linux means working between the two is easier.
  • I guess laying off people is a sign of a company "dieing"?!!? Then IBM, BlueCross/BlueSheild, and 1000's of others must be "going out of business" also. (BlueCross/BlueSheild has been laying off people for 7 years now!)

    Dropping Key Divisions? Pay attention, SGI didn't drop them they "spun them off", a little easy to manage that way.

  • I've spent six months with an O2000 suffering from irreproducable bus errors, segmentation faults, crashes and CPU hang-ups. SGI has not been able to fix it. It's a level of instablity orders beyond what I ever experienced with Cray (pre-SGI) or any other UNIX.
  • Yeah, but all of them are vulnerable to tooltalkdb rpm attacks... :)

    -Chris
  • timed looses it's place, then nfs mounts drop

    We have had this problem too, I think I might be able to pull up a log by this afternoon to post if you want to see it. Haven't fixed it yet :-( anyone that knows a solution, PLEASE let me know. I know we lost overnight numbercrunching data at least twice.

  • "IRIX is a rock-solid OS, and I cannot imagine using Linux on a production workstation at
    this point. But, should some fatherly organization pick Linux up, clean it up, and ensure the interface is one I'm familiar with (ksh and Indigo Magic), and applications suddenly find themselves ported to it, I don't see how it would make much of a difference if I don't notice a performance drop."


    You are crazy (FUD, flame bait). Our SGI boxen are down 5-10 times more often than our Linux servers. And a pile of people out there are using Linux in major mission-critical production environments. Yes, it can be more stable, but...

  • The recent SGI announcments are reasonable and I think that their strategy is sound. The big questions is : who's left at SGI? With the 'slightly' different job market for graphics hardware designers and the strange decisions of SGI in the past few years I'm worried that they have lost most of their best engineers, and SGI is nothing without their engineers.

    On another note : 88 million polys/s on IR? Where does this come from? An IR pipe does 10 million polys/s AFAIK. The big benefit is bandwidth and the fact that basically all of OpenGL is implemented in hardware (a glVertex3f call turns into 7 (!) instructions on an IR machine), offloading the CPUs to do other stuff. But SGI must do something radical to keep hold of high-end graphics, recent delays in the future graphics line does little to inspire confidence.
  • I believe this has to be seriously reworked in the light of the first demoes of what NVIDIA's new GeForce can do.

    And what about SGI transferring its OpenGL experience to NVIDIA (in the form of engineers)? Is this the sign of a healthy company?
  • Strange...

    Where I attend university there is a room that contains approximately 60 IRIX machines. People (not me) use them for CAD, finite element analysis, etc. I use them to check my e-mail :). These machines run 24hrs a day, 7 days a week. I have NEVER seen more than 2/3 not working despite constant use, and no re-boots.

    Not bad for an "unstable" OS ;)
  • I mostly agree with Scott Elyard. But as a SGI user who does not work
    in high-end graphics domain, I must say that:

    2. SGI has a gloomy future. (SGI is dying, losing all its customers &c.)
    I do believe this. In my domain (bioinformatics) which is
    fast expanding, less and less people are buying SGI servers and more
    and more are buying Sun's and Compaq's. If you don't do high-end
    graphics, you really can get better deals elsewhere.

    3. IRIX is being abandoned.
    This is almost true. People who use IRIX like me get pissed off when
    they try to install some new software. Look at setiathome for
    instance. It was available for Win32, MacOS, Linux, SunOS. And
    that's about it. It took months before an IRIX version was made. So
    by merging Linux and IRIX, SGI hopes to make much more software
    available on their machines.

    Having said that, I am a happy SGI customer. And anyway, I am stuck
    with it for a couple of years at least. Fortunately, I managed to
    switch my SGI O2 for a Linux PC!

  • IRIX vs. Linux (Score:4)

    by BadlandZ ( 1725 ) on Thursday September 02, 1999 @05:21AM (#1709663) Journal

    IRIX is a rock-solid OS, and I cannot imagine using Linux on a production workstation at this point.

    I have used IRIX since 1993. I have used Linux since 1997. In January of 1998, I might have agreed. As for the whole calander year of 1999, I have spent about 85% more time using Linux, and about 4% of my time using IRIX (and about 0.1% using DEC-UNIX), and about 10% of my time using FreeBSD. Of the time I spend trying to track bugs, and figure out where errors are comeing from, it's about 50/50 IRIX/Linux. Considering how little I use IRIX, that's probably more time tracking bugs than actual use.

    To tell the truth, I now 4 people here who use IRIX as thier primary workstation OS, and they would opt out if they had a choice. Conclusing, I think today in 1999, I would completely dissagree with the statement "IRIX is a rock-solid OS, and I cannot imagine using Linux on a production workstation at this point."

  • > IRIX is a rock-solid OS, and I cannot imagine
    > using Linux on a production workstation at this
    > point

    I can only imagine that the author of this piece has a very different definition of "production" to mine.

    I had the misfortune of sysadmining an Irix network a few years back, and I must say I have never experienced such an unstable, unpredictable, bloated, inconsistant, swap-happy, disgusting, dreadful, CRAP operating system as Irix. There are only two operating systems I dislike more than NT; SCO and Irix.

    Never before have I been told to "reinstall the operating system" on a UNIX box because of an application failure (namely that SGI's supplied named kept dying). Never before have I had filesystems become corrupt while actually in use - even SCO doesn't do that (and no, it wasn't hardware).

    We had a Challenge set up as a web server that we used to call "Scroedinger's Server". I'm sure you can guess why.

    As to workstation use, did you ever see such a slow window manager? This on machines with 128Mb RAM.

    Of course, that was way back in Irix 5.3 days. The later versions manage to be even more bloated, and yet be even less functional.

    You see, I am someone who gets paid real, live money to look after real, live, user-facing machines. "Bet your business" machines. They have been Solaris machines, AIX machines, Dynix machines, and yes, Linux machines. I sleep at night running these systems.

    The author of this piece, I suspect is not in this position. His idea of a "stable" platform may be one where he can fit a complete render between crashes. If that's all he wants, fair enough - because that's about all he'll get from Irix.
  • I've had meetings with SGI marketing types who told me that the Challeng DM systems we had would not be able to run the newest OS (6.5). Two days later a SGI engineer told me he had installed 6.5 at AOL and Netscape on the same systems. I always trust those marketing guys (the same type of people who designed Windows9x/NT).

    Think.

  • Re:IRIX SUX! (Score:3)

    by BadlandZ ( 1725 ) on Thursday September 02, 1999 @05:30AM (#1709668) Journal
    I've seen a brand new Origin 200 crash once a week. If I can find the logs for that would you want to see them?

    The older SGI's we have here without IRIX updated run fine, 100% stable (including a Personal Iris, still going strong). Indy's got a little funny when we went 5.x to 6.x, but are OK now. Indigo is fine. Octane (one of the newest we have) is doing so-so, no problems yet. Origin 200 has been a nightmear. So, it's hit and miss. If you want relyable, I guess you need to look at the older ones, and older versions of IRIX... I think I agree there is a trend that SGI's hardware and software quality is going downhill.

    But I am not sure I would go as far as as the poster did.... Well, maybe, but it's hard not to like SGI, like your first true love or something. I guess I don't think at this point I would choose to buy one personally if I were out shopping for something in thier price range for my own, but once upon a time, I would have LOVED to own one.

  • What is a former employee of SGI gonna say? "Oh, all the worst people left the company...like me!"

    Please.
  • But a lot of what you are saying is just plain wrong. For starters the summary you link to was posted to the friends of performer mailing list by an SGI employee - and you expect objectivity from that source?

    Also, you disagree that SGI's graphic solutions aren't cost-effective compared to consumer 3D boards - even SGI wouldn't risk such as statement (_they_ would realize it would make them look stupid). SGI's target market is only a tiny fraction of the consumer market in terms of the number of products sold, so there's a good reason for this.

    But SGI's product is not only being superceded in terms of cost effectiveness. SGI's base reality and Infinite Reality (2) systems are not that impressive compared to the consumer boards. The Nvidia GeForce even has a higher polyrate than the single-pipe IR2, and it certainly has a very comparable fill rate (faster or slower depending on the number of raster managers).

    There's nothing that drives product development as fast as the consumer market competion. SGI has faced this reality, why wont you?

    What SGI has, but you fail to mention at all (perhaps because it is a _valid_ point), is slightly more features, like 3D textures and multi-sampling (for e.g. anti-aliasing).

    Now, about the use of SGI worksstations for making special effects in movies. This has nothing to do with SGI hardware at all - Computer animations in movies are based on raytracing techniques, which to my knowledge are done entirely in software. Nobody is disputing that SGI has the expertise when it concerns graphics - but many are (correctly, imho) disputing that SGIs hardware will be able to stay ahead of the consumer products unless they do something radical. SGI sees the same thing and have formed a strategic alliance with the 3D consumer market leader Nvidia - SGI will built their future hardware using the same chips as consumer boards, only SGI will put them to work in parallel, like some company did with the Voodoo(2) chipset

    Linux is not an alternative to SGI yet - the OpenGL hardware support is not solid enough yet, but we're getting there, partially thanks to SGI! Additionally the software isn't there yet either, but we're getting there. For instance SGI(!) is porting performer to linux!

    SGI is a cool company with a _lot_ of engineering talent. They really don't need you to spread FUD - Now that the bosses have woken up and demonstrated that they do have the guts to make truly radical changes like adopting linux as a key element in their strategy, they'll make it just fine.
  • 60 machines? 2/3 not working?

    Back when I was at University (cue shimmer fade)... we had a similar lab with perhaps 50-60 SPARCstations - all SLCs, ELCs, and an IPC. Yeah, we're going back a bit, and it must be said that an SGI would beat them in graphics performance. But the whole point is - the whole time I was there, i.e. for several years, they *all* ran *all the time*. I basically lived in that lab, and there were simply *no* hardware or software problems. The machines were always available.

    ... except the one time someone power-cycled the IPC's colour monitor too quickly and blew its power supply...

  • I don't know of any high end computer systems vendors who post their prices on the web. They will usually have a "book" value, and then if you buy so much per year, you'll get some sort of discount. Buying them from resellers will also get you a different price (because you are getting an "added value" with it).
  • I think it's not pointless to worry about if SGI is going under or not. The important thing is that we can get hardware on which to run free software. Hardware is tough because it can't be duplicated for free.

    I've got an Amiga which runs both Amiga OS and Linux (Linux on 25MHz '040: anything you can do, I can do slower! Don't think I won't put the smack down with the 16MHz '030, either. :-) ). Even if I didn't have the support of all the Amiga developers out there still churning code, I'd still be good to go because I've got Linux and hardware to run it on.

    The SGI owners are even better off. SGI has made some serious open-source contributions. What's to stop them from doing more? They could give Linux the power to take advantage of the SGI hardware like IRIX does.

    I guess what I'm trying to say is it's not important if we lose the ability to choose IRIX if a suitable replacement is available, but it would be bad to lose a platform with such a particular strength (graphics). OTOH, if we *did* lose SGI, the machines already out there would still be supported.

  • To be perfectly honest, the only stock I own is whatever my retirement fund uses.

    I haven't the slightest idea, personally, but I don't think I own any SGI stock.
  • The best thing that happened to IRIX was for the Cray OS QA team to get 'hold of it and whack the bugs out of it. Those folks know that the customer has no sense of humor about crashes losing the last two months of calculations, or whatever. The stability improvement between 6.2 and 6.5 is enormous, and the performance jumped, as well. Yup, there have been five point releases of 6.5 over the past year, but hey! that looks good when it is the Linux 2.2 kernel, but not here?

    I personally view the O2 machine as a big mistake by SGI, and it mars the company's reputation. While the O2000 multi-processor boxes really rock, and the O200 machines support big disk and RAM and show quite decent I/O for the apps I run, I am just way unimpressed by the O2. For the work I do, and as in all this discussion, that is a *key* distinction, it is an overpriced, underpowered PC-wannabe. And, it came with the incredibly buggy IRIX 6.3, the version that was incompatible with most everything else IRIX. (Yes, 6.3, the OS that third-party developers love to hate. 25-40 meg patch files? That's an OS replacement!) To me, the O2's niche must be a very small one. Your mileage may vary.

    I've seen at least three types of applications for SGI hardware discussed on this thread: Heavy Graphics (the SGI myth author), sys admins for web servers, and data transfer/communications (what I do). The graphics guy is happy with his high-end SGI machines. The web server sysadmin is unhappy with the performance and stability of SGI in an area SGI used to target. I have a mixed opinion, liking the higher-end machines, but not the O2 for data transfer/database/communications.

    Thus endeth my attempts to influence direction on this thread. :-)

  • I have been adminstering IRIX boxes for the last 5 years, including an Origin 2000 for the last 2. I work on an SGI workstation for my primary box every single day.

    As you might guess, I *like* Irix, and plan to keep using it as long as SGI keeps supporting it. There are plenty of Irix boxes used as business-critical systems. Many of the top supercomputers in the world are IRIX-based systems.

    You have to remember that this guy uses IRIX as a graphics workstation. In this respect, it kicks the crap out of Linux. IRIX also does much better on high end systems. SGI is supporting Linux on lower-end servers becuase it is much more cost-effective and becuase of the groundswell of support for Linux apps.

  • IRIX is insecure! Any system which ships with unpassworded accounts is NOT SECURE! Not to mention the "holey" cgi-scripts.
  • Yeah, fair comment.

    We also have a room full of SPARCstations, probably about 60-70 again, and they do seem to be more stable BUT way slow compared with the nice IRIX machines. I guess 6 of one....

    ;)
  • I use an SGI as my primary box. So do others here. We also use Linux in a production capacity (our firewall). I adminster both Linux ans IRIX boxes.

    I wouldn't switch if I could - and I could if I wanted to.
  • No need to post the log, I am quite happy to take your word for it. I was just saying that not all IRIX machines crash out all the time.

    And if nothing else, they do have funky boxes :)

  • Remember a key fact about stocks.
    Doesn't matter how strong the sell is.
    SOMEONE IS BUYING THESE STOCKS.
    For each seller there is a buyer.

    To paraphrase PJ O'Rourke, most people don't do stocks for the dividends, and certainly not for the voting rights. Stocks (for the hoi polloi) are an opinion, that 'this company will be worth more in the future'. Like it or not; SGI's future is uncertain, and thus to have a strong opinion now is folly. Hence the 'strong sell'. But SGI *will* have a future of some sort, people are just wondering about the worth of said future.



  • This is one of the few times I would respond to a topic like this. All OS's have bad hair days and crappy support lines, not to mention user error, but SGI takes the cake. I worked at shop that ran a mix of Solaris, FreeBSD and WinNT. The offending product was an Origin 2000 (nicknamed "Barney" due to its purple box) that was forced on to us by a client and a sales manager. We spent 2 weeks trying to compile GCC on it. After 2 weeks, we called SGI, and they tell us we will have to buy their C compiler. Ok, fair enough, we fork out the cash.

    After another week of trying to install their compiler we call SGI again to get support. They now tell us that should have ordered the server with the C compiler pre-installed and that we will have to ship the box back to SGI. More time and money. Basically, they try to structure their support such that anything you need on box has to be loaded at the factory or be installed by field rep. Which all adds up to $$$$. I guess if I was a high-end animation house, I might want this type of service. But for shops who are used to doing their own work, this is a very expensive way get a box in production.

    I would say that we might have been boneheads about the install except that installing GCC on Solaris, HPUX, Linux or FreeBSD is a 20-minute task. What is troublesome is SGI reaction to the problem. They never gave us information to resolve the problem, they only tried to get more $$$ out of us. Call SGI support and then call Cisco and you will see what I am talking about.

    And yes, IRIX is not secure. Check out the security sites if you are in doubt.
  • If you read back a few months, SGI signed an agreement with NVidia to cooperate on consumer graphics chipsets. I'll betcha that a good part of the NV10 (esp. the GPU) is SGI tech.

    Hopefully they have something really kick-ass high-end for the own high-end graphics.
  • I love SGI. I've bought a million dollars worth of their little machines for visual effects/computer graphics production. I even went to work there for a while, because I thought that they could change the graphics world for the better.

    You know what's coming, don't you. The 'but'

    But, I agree that SGI's future is quite gloomy. There were two things I heard yesterday that cemented it for me.

    1. A friend of mine sells SGIs to people like me. He sold $12 million a couple of years ago, and $1.2 million last year.

    2. There was a 'meet the CEO' meeting for resellers. You know, the people you actually buy SGI machines from. It was held at the same time and place as a SUN reseller meeting. SGI went so far as to raffle off one of their new Intel boxes to get people to attend. Less than 10 people showed up to see Belluzzo, in a room that would have seated hundreds. Can you imagine what it must have felt like to Belluzzo? Any question that when Microsoft came calling with millions of shares of stock options that he jumped ship? Meanwhile, at the next-door SUN reseller meeting, there were hundreds of people.

    I love SGI -- and I think that they have some truly great people. A lot of people have left, it's true, but some of the best remain. But they've got to find a way to apply those people to a mission that makes economic sense.

    I'll keep my O2's for at least the next several years, and will continue to buy them (used, really amazingly cheap) until I can find a Linux box that has the speed, flexibility, video, and graphics performance of an O2. My guess is that it will be another year or so before that happens -- the graphics will get there probably by the end of this year. I have all the tools ported already (it's not that big a deal, really) so we'll be able to make the leap when the time comes.

    thad

  • The author says that SGI is stable, rock-solid, but offers no evidence. He then dismisses people who say SGI as unstable as spreading FUD. Well, making blanket statements with no evidence is FUD (or reverse FUD).

    Nothing against SGI, but this is a really dumb article. Layoffs and restructuring do warrant concern about the future of a company. Saying that people who are concerned about SGI's future are spreading FUD is stupid.

    ----------------------------------
  • What's wrong with ksh for Linux?

  • This is an interesting discussion.
    Yesterday I was talking with our VP of engineering who came from SGI (where I think he worked on the IRIX OS). He had several interesting comments about SGI.

    1. Most of the operating system engineers who worked on IRIX have left. SGI is turning to Linux out of desparation since so many of the people who are knowlegable about the internal workings of IRIX are gone. Apparently SGI's deal with Micro$oft did not go over well with their development team.

    2. XFS will be a nightmare to make stable for Linux. XFS is not a clean file system like JFS, but contains a horrendous amount of complexity (read bloat), such as lots of multimedia support, special scheduling code, and so forth. It will be hard to separate the bloat from the core of the file system. Due to its complexity it will be very difficult to understand and make stable. It is likely that SGI is releasing it as open source since they don't know what else to do with it since all of the original developers left.

    3. SGI's deal with Microsoft was a huge mistake. Any company that teams with Microsoft is doomed to failure. Microsoft used the deal to essentially kill OpenGL as a valid 3-D platform for Windows and replaced it with Direct-3D.

    4. SGI's acquisition of Cray was a huge mistake. The folks at Cray and the Mips division clashed and essentially killed Mips. The Cray folks pushed for vector processing in the Mips processor, which was not a good match. The Mips people argued against this. The Cray team won. The reason is that Cray's bread and butter is their SIMD vector processing. Without it, Cray is nothing. The vector processing conflicted with the whole idea behind RISC, which is to keep things simple. Guess what happened to Mips?

  • Re:Price too high, Sales dept. is a pain (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IBM does for their S70As. Here is is:

    http://commerce.www.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce/Ca tegoryDisplay?cgrfnbr=2039099&cgmenbr=1&cn try=840&lang=en_US

    Yes, it is $150,000 and you can add it to your shopping cart. No, they are not kidding.

    Yes, if you buy several, you can get a small discount. So what?

    I can really relate as I had to price out SGIs vs some RS6000s recently for servers. The call to IBM was 90 seconds, I got a call back with a quote and even the volume discounts, the service contracts, and the names of the local CEs. With SGI, it took me two weeks to find out that they were about 2x as expensive. The whole deal felt like SGI was trying to stick it to us and felt that if they took us out to lunch enough, we wouldn't notice. I didn't like it and, as much as I like food, I don't have time for several days of 3+ hour lunches that were designed to function as sales foreplay. Just stupid.

    We went with the IBMs, they have run like tops, and we will do it again early next year.

    Of course, we aren't doing high end graphics, so we had a choice, but I can't imagine that high end graphics people like the feeling of being screwed with a smile any more than me.
  • Uh huh. The X server in 6.2 has got to be the biggest piece of feces ever shat upon the surface of this poor planet. It crashes nearly daily when using Netscape. Good stuff! It just did it about 5 minutes ago, so I'm not in the best of moods at present.

    As for secure, all you need to do is search the bugtraq archives from '97 and '98 -- nearly every setuid 0 binary had a root-giving exploit for it. I'll agree that any OS can be insecure, sure, but, Christ, IRIX was *really fucking bad* a year or so ago. To its credit, it hasn't appeared much recently on bugtraq/rootshell/etc, so maybe things have finally turned around.

    4Dwm still sucks, though.

    - A.P. (running WMaker on this IP22)
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • >Now, about the use of SGI worksstations for >making special effects in movies. This has nothing >to do with SGI hardware at
    > all - Computer animations in >movies are based on raytracing techniques, which >to my knowledge are done entirely in
    > software.

    Wrong! Many movies are composited (ie the different layers of the animation are added together) on software such Discreet's Inferno system. This runs on
    an Onyx2 IR and renders final frames using the OpenGL graphics pipeline. ILM uses it in house but calls it Sabre. Check out www.discreet.com for info. In this market SGI has NO competition, if they ain't using discreet they're using Kodak Cineon or Avid Illusion or Jaleo or Chalice, but they all run on SGI hardware. (yes there is NT compositing solutions but not at the high end).

    Also in 3d modeling, sure you render the final frames using software only but during modelling you need a good opengl pipeline so you can see your 50,000 poly texture heavy model at a decent speed to make changes. Try running Maya or Softimage on your TNT or Voodoo 2, what's that, won't run? Funny that.... (Games 3D cards not equal good professional 3d card)

    (a visual fx operator and everyday sgi user)
  • I managed to somehow get the precompiled gcc binaries on reality.sgi.com to install on one of our R10K boxes. On a good day, it actually compiles binaries, too. I got it to make me a working "mpg123" last week. I feel proud of myself.

    My experience might well be an anomaly, though.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • It's like the flat earthers, who continue to insist the earth is not round.

    This is one of the funnier lines in the article, since it so clearly applies to the writer rather than the folks he disagrees with.

    In a couple of places, he refers to SGI being profitable. According to the SEC [sec.gov], SGI hasn't posted an annual profit in years. In the latest quarterly report [sec.gov], they posted another huge loss. They have 'announced' a $22 million profit for the latest quarter, but I'll reserve judgement until the 10Q is filed.

    They are on their third CEO in three years.

    They are on their third 'strategy' in three years.

    They are selling off their NT and Cray divisions. The last time they did this [sun.com], they sold the "Business Systems Division" piece of Cray to Sun for a pittance. Sun used that division to create the Starfire [sun.com] (actually, it was almost finished at SGI), which has already sold more than 1500 units, for a total of (guessing) more than $1.5 billion.

    Not only are they losing money every quarter, their top line (ie, sales) have been shrinking for three years.

    The value of their stock has dropped by about 50% in the last 9 months.

    They just laid off more than 15% of their workforce.

    How much do you need before acknowledging that a once-great company is in real trouble?

  • i had this too and still have this problem. Never managed to resolve it...Server has a load average of 0.3 and the NFS mounts still fail. *sniff* i love SGI machines but lately my linux boxes have been giving better and faster service than SGI boxes. For crying out loud - GET IRIX BACK ON TRACK OR DROP IT. HALF ARSED MEASURES REALLY PISS PEOPLE OFF. I'd love to see a linux port with full X support on my O2's, origin 200's, indys and origin 2000 boxes. cmon SGI - WAKE UP!
  • i'll second this. its horrifying to find an SGI employee spreading FUD deliberately. SGI has loads more problems than any of my Linux boxes (even with NFS3 when Linux boxen are running the unfinished NFS2 and doing a better job). IRIX is *not* more stable than linux.
  • Just for the record. Many in both the high end and low end of the entertainment industry are switching over to affordable networked PCs setup as renderfarms. 3D animation programs like Animation Master Network version and LightWave have built in support for this. A 20 to 60 pc renderfarm (made up of PIIs and PIIIs) is usually cheaper and faster than an Onyx. More importantly, if one of those PCs goes down, all the rest can still perform while you get it replaced.
    Both the above mentioned programs can also do this with MACs.

  • Re:Feh. (Score:2)

    by Zurk ( 37028 )
    as an sgi admin user and long time sgi fan - i'd like to point out that SGI has the crappiest licensing scheme of *any* unix out there - nodelocked licensing sucks. are you on crack SGI ? Godammit if im running a critical app like proe and my license machine goes down, the whole department is shut down from using proe..the backup servers dont seem to do their job - GET YOUR HEAD OUTA YOUR ARSE SGI. Expensive licensing, modelocks, time limited stuff, a compiler (MIPS Pro) thats basically incompatible with GCC (slightly different language syntax - why ? why ?)
    Irix has been going downhill since 5.3..6.5 sucks..cant even do NFS properly.
  • I don't know quite what to think about IRIX, but I don't think I can be as dismissive of it as you are.

    The only black mark I can think of is that IRIX has had some hiccups with major version transitions. The worst was to 5.0, but what UNIX hasn't had major transition SNAFUs? Remember Solaris 2.0? Blech!! The move from AIX 3.1.x to 3.2 was even worse! Linux fans should not forget the (g)libc transition. So IRIX is no different here.

    The hardware has always been decent. On the few SGIs I've dealt with, crashes were never a problem. The worst problem I've had with an SGI is getting a replacement disk for an old Indy in a research lab on an island in the middle of the Atlantic - logistics, not technical. I've worked with two Challenge boxen that ran Sybase, one in development, one in production. They were solid.

    No, the only difference to me is that IRIX is neither Linux nor Solaris. It is something else, perhaps related, but something else. Since I work with Solaris and play with Linux, IRIX remains for the most part unfamiliar to me. When I have to deal with it I can usually fudge my way through it, but it remains slightly unfamiliar as compared to my more familiar warm and fuzzy UNIX variants.

    So it's a little different is all.

    People should remember that Linux isn't _the_ UNIX, nor is Solaris, nor *BSD, nor IRIX. They all are members of a recognisable and sometimes unruly family. Slagging one afmily member off reflects badly on the whole. Just remember, each has its own talents.

    -M



  • SGI will not be on the road to recovery until they dump the evil, stupid new logo.

    The new logo is just Belluzzo's way to add insult to injury after his evil tenure at SGI, before crawling back to whence he spawned, Microsoft.
  • You said (quoting him, and adding your own comments):

    "no PC has even been able to match the aging Reality Engine gfx first made available on the original Onyx in 1994, much less the 88 million polys/second (shaded,
    textured, and antialiased) of the Infinite Reality on the Onyx, introduced two years later."

    The Onyx2 Infinite Reality 2 is rated at 13 million polygons per second (http://www.sgi.com/onyx2/sys_hardware.html).

    Nvidia's NV10 (now called the GeForce 256) is quoted at 15 million triangles per second (http://www.3dgpu.com/chip/index.cfm).

    Now, I'll be the first to say that I've had experience with neither card/PC/whatever, nor will I anytime soon, most likely, but I just wanted to point out something and attempt to ascertain whether or not you were correct in making your claim about the Nvidia NV10. You said "triangles," which I don't consider polygons, and I never really thought anyone else did either. Now, I realize that this may not matter, because I'm guessing the NV10's performance with polygons matches that of its performance with triangles, but I just wanted to point out that [apparent, to me at least] error in your argument against the Onyx2 Infinite Reality 2 and in favor of the NV10. That said, I haven't quite figure out which side to believe: the pro-SGI camp or the con-SGI camp, although I'm wondering if I'd just go a bit more with the con-SGI camp, because I'm thinking that, if they were _that_ good, they'd be more prevelant.

    That said, thank you.
  • Well, as much as I hate to admit it, MIPS Pro 7.3 is a pretty dang good compiler. I would be happy enough if SGI open sourced IRIX, Red Hat sent Alan Cox to SGI and got him working full time to get the best of IRIX into Linux, and replaced IRIX with Linux.

    But, GCC is no where near as good a compiler is MIPS Pro 7.3 for thier hardware.

  • Re:IRIX more solid than Linux? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This kind of stuff just irk's me, just drills home that the reliability of a box is more about the skill of the admin then OS you use. One experience can not make a generality. My SGI boxes have stayed up for over a year, but my other OS's didn't; so if I were to make a generality... because I have had my boxes up over a year and my Solaris, Linux & FreeBSD boxes haven't been I guess Irix must be allways superior. I guess Solaris must be superior because the first thing anyone does is throw out UFS and buy Veritas because UFS is so good. I guess Linux doesn't ever do a fsck because it does journaled filesystems. I guess either box has a gig backplane for throwing around terabytes of data and gigs of storage. I don't see where you get bloat from, you want to install every damn thing fine go ahead.. I tend to tell it to not install the demo videos on my boxes of course that's just me. I guess you don't want the XFS filesystem that SGI is open sourceing. I guess that the US Government is one of the largest purchasers of SGI equipment because it crashes all of the time when they are doing nuclear computations. I suppose because almost all (I did use almost) movie productions use a SGI somewhere when they are making special effects because they love to see it crash. I suppose ATT.net, AOL.com use it for webservers because they like crashes (netcraft survey). Hospitals never need reliable equipment, I guess that's why they use Irix for research. Shall I continue. Oh and right now.. I've got SGI's, Suns, Sequent, Linux totaling over 20million plus 10+ terabytes of storage; and you know what none of them go down. I guess you see that I'm one who gets paid real, live money for thousand transactions per second projects and they don't go down, but I guess I don't take care of "Bet your business" machines. I have yet to find an OS that is more unreliable than the admin running it... I guess since you other boxes stay that you've learned how to actually admin a production box since you used Irix 5.3.... Feeling grumpy and crotchety today... tsuiter@midusa.net
  • Unified Memory makes things like page flipping extremely smooth.

    The two have nothing to do with each other.
  • Dude, are you such a blind fan that you refuse to look at this objectively?

    A company adopting Linux is usually a good thing. I like the fact that SGI has done this - they're great Linux supporters, and I wish them all the success in the world.

    I like SGI as a company too. I still remember the days that I'd drool over their servers & workstations.

    However, I am DISAPPOINTED with SGI as a company. They have failed to market their innovative products, they have failed to attract new followers. They are in -maintenance mode-, not -growth mode-. That's a bad sign.

    Adopting Linux, though objectively a great move, is also a dangerous and somewhat embarrasing move. This is a company that has already passed through a bandwagon with Windows NT. Now they're jumping onto another one.

    There is a *pattern* of failing companies adopting a bandwagon technology and taking the stance that "XXX will save us!". Intergraph did this with Windows NT - and it worked - for a while. They're losing LESS money, but they're still losing money :)

    Amiga Inc. has tried for years to re-release the Amiga. QNX couldn't help it (even though it is a gorgeously designed OS), but now supposedly Linux (and every other industry buzz word: Jini, Java, etc.) can.

    Corel has done this FOUR TIMES now - first with Windows 95, then with WordPerfect, then with Java, now with Linux. Each time they got burned, and Michael Cowpland got bitter. That man sure has balls, but I really hope he hits a home run soon, because it ain't going to do Linux any good if he fails, and it ain't going to help the Canadian technology industry.

    All of these technologies are GREAT technologies (yes, even Java). But using them to SAVE YOUR COMPANY is a fool's journey. A solid business theory combined with a model to implement that theory is what works. Technology for technology's sake doesn't make profits, and an unprofitable company does very little to help our society in the long run.

    So please, understand my position. SGI jumping on Linux doesn't seem like a re-invigorated company looking to impress us - it looks like a tired & frightened company, drowning in raging rapids, looking to hold onto the last branch before the waterfall. Surely this is exagerrated (their financials aren't THAT bad), but perception rarely reflects reality. Deal with it.
  • I had the distinct pleasure of working as the junior Admin of a Web Hosting company that was 50/50 sgi/NT with ChallengeS, Indy, and Origin 200's. The vast majority of our problems had more to do with the Netscape Enterprise 3 servers zombieing on us than any hardware problems. The Challenge S's and Indys would crash about once every six months (The Senior SA attributed it to Cosmic ray hits on the RAM SIMS, and I'm prone to believe him as he had his phD in Astro-Physics) The O200's though we never had a problem with. Never. As for the sgi shipped software (named in particular) why didn't you download GCC and build named 8 and install it? We did, worked great. timed? Forget that xntpd worked wonders.
  • At the risk of sounding lame, "me too".

    For my Masters thesis, I am writing code in C++, using STL and Qt. The code takes about a minute to compile and link on the university's Indy workstations. However, I was surprised to find that on my 133MHz Pentium laptop, it makes in seconds.

    Given that it doesn't use anything IRIX-specific, I've pretty much switched all development over to Linux, using the Indys mostly to access email and the web and print stuff.

    -- acb [being able to code whilst on the bus is another advantage of having a laptop...]
  • I have a hard time believing this... as much as I like linux, irix is just *way* more advanced when it comes to big iron, like NUMA architectures... unless they are planning on porting unicos to the mips. I just think that it is a little simplistic to think that SGI will drop irix on it's high end mips boxes in favor of linux.

  • ...not to mention the gaping hole cut in X authentication, no doubt to install some cool-looking graphics and impress some Hollywood suit.
  • I had this problem until I installed some of the
    recommended patches for 6.2. And I kind
    of *liked* 4Dwm (I use Windowmaker too now though)
  • While SGI may have no peers in certain specialised market niches, I would humbly suggest that it come to the realities of the marketplace in pricing third party peripherals and knic-knac add-ons. Doing head-head comparisons of features, I would quite happily pay a premium for SGI functions that are truely unique and truely add productive value to work. However, as a budget concious customer, I would be royally pissed off at the massive markups on bundled 3rd party goods (admittedly it has gotten better in recent years) with limited choice (try getting Irix drivers for exotic hardware). As hardware and software becomes a commodity, the power of choice shifts to the buyer. People who purchase SGI goods are not idiots, but how long will loyalty last when they find out that adding the SGI name to a rebadged product adds significantly to the cost (and this goes to any branded vs white box hardware)? SGI does have a lot of technical brilliance in its favor and it could become a rebound story a la Apple with its adoption of Linux. However, they really need to have some clarity of thought as to the value they are offering compared with their competition and provide efficient execution in an era of faster business cycles. Promises are nice but delivery is what counts.

    LL
  • Soory, I should have clarified: I'm not in the employ of SGI, and I never have been, either.

    And, naturally, I disagree it's FUD. Naturally, I don't expect to find to many graphics people using Linux, but my point was it won't matter to most of us if we suddenly find we are, so long as it means we still have our apps and environment.

  • Re:Linux beats IRIX (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't doubt you a bit, but let me state a couple of things though. The Indy came out 5+ years ago, and was never meant to be a number cruntcher. SGI's are NOT good general use workstations, they are great graphics modeling workstations, and excellent servers. What it was/is good for was doing high I/O activities, up until 3 months ago when I left my previous employer we had an Indy for a news server taking a full news feed, 20 gig of storage, serving usenet to 17,000 customers. It actually was slated to be removed 2 years ago, but it keeps going and it keeps serving the news without any delays (to my dismay, I allways love new boxes). I can't think of a x86 box that came out 5 years ago that can take a T1's worth of incoming news feed, plus a T1 of outgoing news traffic and do it without having to be rebooted for a year and a half. The box keeps going and going and doesn't slow down, it still amazes me as to how good the box pushes data around. If you want to compile programs, go into the server line (or at least a newer box 5 years is 2 years past the 3 year usefull lifespan rule of thumb) or go for a x86 box do the developement and do a final compile on the SGI if that's where you want it to run. SGI's fill very specific niches, graphic modelling and big time IO, neither of which fit your problem. If you want to throw around big chunks of files or push 1.5 gig over a network than they would fit. tsuiter@midusa.net
  • What hasn't been really brought out is that SGI's problems come from gross mismanagement at the mid and upper levels of the company.

    I worked at SGI as a contractor a few years back, and then, they had lots of smart engineers, but no effective communication or strategization of what they were trying to accomplish as a company (except maybe "we want to do K00L stuff!"). Surprisingly enough, I also didn't see any real evidence of a QA process for IRIX (which explains how lousy IRIX is from a stability point of view).

    The situation is worse now, because the smart engineers read the writing on the wall, and bailed. And management types who are good and have hot prospects are not going to sign up with a company in as bad shape at SGI.

    SGI is the walking dead. All this talk of their technology misses the vital point that you can't operate a large company like SGI without effective management (no matter how cool the technology).

    I know people who are very sharp and have left SGI, in their opinion, the best people have already left SGI. The ones who are left either are part of the problem, or else are busy looking for new jobs.

    And SGI can't hire good new people because good people don't want to work with the walking dead.

    Someone will buy them, to acquire some of the cool hardware technology - but nobody wants IRIX (not even SGI).

  • re: ray tracing

    it is horrendously expensive; so I understand that alot of hackery it performed to avoid it as much as possible. The renderman architecture with shaders et ali is basically a gigantic framework of heuristic methods to avoid ray tracing if at all possible. Many of these hacks could probly be done in hardware. Hence Professional GFX boards.

    .. erm. I think. I'm just guessing, really.

  • czesc ;-)
  • It "dosen't?"
  • Evans & Sutherland made some truly wonderful machines called the Picture System and Picture System II in the late 70s, and early 80s. They made some of the first frame buffers too. We had a couple of Picture Systems (vector-based graphics machines) and six of the frame buffers at NYIT.

    The E&S machines, like the SGI machines, had wonderfully low-level graphics libraries. You could easily code up small programs, and build the complexity yourself -- exactly like IrisGL and OpenGL. [The fact that Jim Clark, founder of SGI, was at NYIT at the time is surely just a coincidence.]

    Then E&S made their Picture System 300. It was an advance in many ways -- it was color, it drew vectors much faster than the PS2, it was better in almost every respect except one. The only way that you could talk to the machine was this incredibly arcane dataflow language. Now, dataflow was a programming phase that was popular then (sort of like C++ now :)) but it was a disaster. Very few PS 300s were sold (at least to graphics research and production companies) because you couldn't get to the guts of the machine, you couldn't make it do what you wanted. You could only make it do what E&S thought that you wanted.

    Low level libraries are really key. OpenGL is better than Direct3D. OpenGL is better than PHIGS. OpenGL is better than Inventor (and I helped write Inventor.) Let the user build the data structures and controls that suit her. Amazingly few people get this.

    thad

  • As an ex third party developer for SGI, and as
    an ex SGI employee, I just have to comment on this. What most people miss when talking about SGI is (quite apart from market forces), the extent that they have done damage to themselves over the years.

    As a third party software developer:
    The following was a typical encounter with SGI:

    - SGI would come to town to talk about the plans for new desktop machine XXX. They would happily present how it would do a bunch of neato things like stream video or texture map with color cubes.

    - We would tell them that what was REALLY needed was faster line drawing in 3D, and in color mapped mode. The other stuff sounds neat, but is pretty useless commercially.

    - They would tell us that what we were asking for was too boring. Not sexy enough.

    - We would tell them that it was what customers NEEDED. Otherwise the PC's would catch up.

    - They would ignore us.

    My favourite instance of this was the Indigo 2 Impact. It supported lots of new features, but in some cases was actually SLOWER doing the operations performed by ALL 3D packages 90% of the time (3D lines in color mapped mode).

    Guess what happened? The PC caught up.

    From a customer perspective:
    SGI was the only game in town for 10 years. The sales force new this, and treated customers with disdain. How SGI was screwing you was a pretty typical topic of conversation around the graphics watercoolers. Waiting 2 months for replacement parts is a good example. Funny how the loan company would never wait 2 months for payment on the machines.

    Finally, as an ExSGI employee:
    All I can say is that 95% of the talent has left the company. Once the ship starts sinking in the Valley, the rats leave really quickly. Most SGI'ers are happily working at internet startups and graphics startups. Few good ones remain.

    It's all very sad.
  • >>3a. IRIX is unstable/insecure/unreliable. I
    >>don't think these sorts of comments are >>relevant.

    >Then your an idiot!

    A.K.A. "Not a sysadmin"

    Ryan
  • What would you accept as proof of stability?

    If I say I'm using a workstation right now that has been up for 24 days, what does that prove, even if you accept it? If I say the only time an SGI has ever crashed on me in four years' use was during the installation of buggy WACOM tablet drivers, would that impress you?

    What would you want?

    I dismiss people who say SGI is dying as spreading FUD. That SGI is unstable... I don't accept. SGI has done a lot of good lately, and I think it's obvious that many are refusing to accept this, and are still offering the same excuses as last year, as though nothing has changed, and maybe not enough has.

    And, later, you ask what's wrong with ksh on Linux...

    You can't start Lightwave from it.

    Perhaps very narrow view most people have regarding computers here. Some of us still don't like the command line, even after using it for lots of our computer-using lives.

    Obviously, not being able to start LW from ksh isn't the real issue, it's working in an environment that is consistent and stable, which IRIX is. If SGI can deliver Linux in such a way to reduce concerns about stability or compatibility, it won't matter to me, personally, what I'm using.

    Yes, for the record, I see nothing wrong with 4Dwm. Or Indigo Magic. At least, i don't have problems that can't be leveled at X-windows in general, across the board, and whatever the window manager.

    And no, I don't work for SGI.
  • Whoops. This paragraph only makes sense if I finish it:

    Perhaps [I should write about the] very narrow view most people have regarding computers here. Some of us still don't like the command line, even after using it for lots of our computer-using lives.
  • There is usually nothing wrong with a workstation having security holes you can drive a truck through. If your firewall is doing its job, then the security threat should never reach IRIX. IRIX is great for what it was designed to do, graphics. Optimizations in IRIX to meet those ends kind of goes against the UNIX philosphoy for rock solid and air-tight. But worrying about security features, and 300 day uptimes, would not meet the needs of the OS. Having stability or speed comes at the price of the other. IE. You can make it really fast if you don't care if it crashes every few minutes.
  • Is it just me, or do all the sysadmins on /. seem to have a superiority complex? What do you call someon who is more happy with a computer would rather have 10X more stable, than 10X more powerful? A sysadmin.
  • SGI would love to ditch the "new, improved" logo, but it just isn't in the cards. Whatchagonnado? Think of it as you would a scar on your face from a broken beer bottle in a bar fight. When looked at in that light, it has a certain charm, right?
  • >There's been a serious downturn in profitability
    >between 1995 and 1998 which is seriously >disconcerting.

    Why is this disconcerting? What about all of the recent "darlings" of Wall Street, such as Amazon.com, Red Hat, etc. Have any of them *ever* made a profit? I doubt it...

  • You can configure and price HP PA-RISC worstations and servers on HP website.
    You can get a base price quote for Compaq Alpha Servers and AlphaStations.
    Finally, you can configure and price Sun Ultra 5/10/2/60/250/450 machines right on SUN website.
  • About the only major disagreement I have with this article is the issue of security.

    IRIX has just about the most suid root programs of any other UNIX around. Time and time again there are vulnerabilities found in some suid root program (usually related to their overengineered GUI). They reportedly hired a person at least a year ago specifically to audit all the code and eliminate buffer overruns. However, new and old buffer overruns are still discovered at a fairly steady rate.

    Of course if you use IRIX as a server OS and remove/disable all the desktop setuid stuff as well as turn off all the network services you don't use, then IRIX is almost as secure as the next UNIX. However the point is not to compare one highly-tightened down UNIX against the next highly-tightened down UNIX. The point of rating security of a given OS is how secure is that OS out of the box.

    If you make an apples-to-apples comparison of IRIX against some of the OS's specifically designed to be secure (OpenBSD, etc), then IRIX fails utterly.

    --Dave

  • Man you're a jackass. Think about what you just said.
  • ?ttp://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SGI&d=my [yahoo.com] Look at graph. Ford, GM, even Dodge doesn't do this (unless they are following the rest of the market). SGI's droping while other Tech stocks rise.
  • For the record, I do work at SGI, so am obviously biased. But I have to respond with a huge "WTF" to this. Some of your points are correct, but some are so far from wrong.

    1. SGI is moving to Linux because we don't have the expertise to support Irix.

    Wrong. We have lost many, many people with lots of experience. But the move to Linux has nothing to do with that. The move to Linux is because it's getting harder and harder to get ISVs to port their apps to Irix. Someone mentioned earlier in this thread that it took forever to get Seti@Home under Irix. That is the exact reason.

    2. Porting XFS is a last ditch effort by SGI because we don't understand the source code.

    Again, far from true. Linux doesn't have a journaling file system, which it badly needs. If we want to rely on Linux, we have to see that need fulfilled. Throughing out random code we don't understand just makes no sense. Especially when you consider a heavy IP-cleaning process is involved before we release it, which means *somebody* has to understand (or learn) the code. That process alone offsets any "let others figure it out" possibilities.

    3. The Microsoft deal.

    You may be correct that dealing with Microsoft is akin to dealing with the Devil. But to say that OpenGL died as a result is rewriting history. Just before the deal was signed was the legendary D3D vs. OpenGL war. What was the D3D's side biggest point? No OpenGL drivers for any PC boards. Why? Microsoft stalled on registering the ones submitted by PC vendors. Nowadays, how many PC boards have OpenGL drivers? Every single one. And as vendors look at cross-platform games, OpenGL is a no-brainer. If anything, the deal allowed OpenGL to fly in under the radar and get better support.

    4. You're probably right that the Cray merger was a huge mistake. But I don't know too much about that area of the company, so I'll steer clear.

    Sorry, but too many of your comments came across as the worst possible readings of current happenings, and I just wanted to provide some counters.

    Terence Ripperda
    SGI
  • Does anyone know of a port of the "flight" [simulator] program to use X on non-SGI hardware? That would be cool.
  • I was not complaining about bad spelling or typoes, I was complaining about the shoddy sentence structure which renders entire sentences into meaningless gibberish.

    --
  • Never seen this NFS drop problem. Am I just lucky?

    Maybe you're not using IRIX 6.5; I heard it has NFS problems. I use 6.2 and never seen any of my Linuxes "dealing with" network outages while running NFS as well as my IRIX does.

  • An "Insiders" Perspective (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm an ex-SGI employee, hence the "Anonymous Coward" post. But that said, I can't claim to having a huge amount of inside information... this is just the kind of stuff you would here employees complaining about in places like the internal newsgroup sgi.bad-attitude (which can make the slashdot "RedHat=Microsoft" posts look optimistic).

    There are incessant complaints inside SGI that the company seems to be incapable of marketing. It just builds stuff and expects people to find out about it somehow and come and get it. There are complaints about the company constantly coming up with neat Cool Ideas, and then dropping them, to the point that that no ISV is willing to listen to the next Cool Idea. And there are incessant complaints about poor management (e.g. don't believe anyone who says that SGI has decided to abandon Irix... SGI never makes a decision about anything).

    I can state with confidence that buying Cray was a completely insane thing to do. Cray's operations remain unintegrated with SGI, and there remains no "synergy" whatsoever between the two. It may have kept the Cray product line alive, but it nearly killed SGI in the process.

    Belluzo may have been doing something useful that I'm unaware of (in the realm of cost containment, for example), but I have the impression that SGI's return to profitability had very little to do with him. He did not turn the company towards Wintel, that project was going already before he signed on (I would guess it was one of the things that attracted him). It is true that he seemed to be incapable of saying something as simple as "Oh, and by the way we're not abandoning Irix, so don't quit buying our other machines" (but it could be that the press just refused to quote him when he said that... the press in general, and the San Jose Merc in particular seemed to have it in for SGI in recent years).

    And Belluzo did a number of things that annoyed the hell out of the old-time SGI people. One of his first acts was to ban dogs from the workplace (SGI has traditionally been a dog-friendly place). Whatever he was thinking, to us it all looked like a ridiculous piece of muscle flexing. Some people speculated he wanted people to quit so he wouldn't have to pay them lay-off packages.

    Anywway: losing Belluzo is not at all a bad thing for SGI.

    Turning to Linux is pretty clearly a good idea, though the question is whether SGI did it soon enough. If they'd listened to their techies, they would have been one of the first major companies to embrace Linux, now they're playing catch-up...

    But I certainly would not want you to assume that SGI is dead. For one thing, I still have SGI stock (yes, I am an idiot) in fact, let me state right here that I heard a rumor recently that Compaq is thinking about buying SGI. Or maybe it was IBM. Or Nintendo.

    But seriously, don't count out SGI. Last I heard, they were sitting on enough cash reserves to get through a long bad stretch. If anything I'd guess they're in a slightly better position today.

  • Kind of a humorous thread considering that VMS died years ago, yet VMS related business is bigger than all of SGI (based on revenues). I'd say IRIX is quite marginalized compared to Linux and Solaris.

    been-there-seen-that ...
  • You weren't?

    >You didn't exactly have correct spelling ...
  • Sorry but I you pay attention to what is happening at the senior VP level at SGI. John Vrolyk, Senior Vice President in the Computer Systems Business Unit gave a speech at the Open Source Conference in Monterey. There he highlighted several things.

    1. Linux is the OS of the future. Porting XFS to Linux is just the beginning. Every piece of OS IP (intelluctual property) that SGI owns is going to be open sourced. Right now they are reviewing patents/outside IP so that they don't step on anyone's toes. IRIX will be discontinued in so far that it will not exist as a seperate commercial OS. IRIX development will continue in the short term, however SGI understands the strategic value of open source. This not happening for several years, simply because they didn't want to overwhelm the open source community with too much to integrate. As John said,"I have 539 engineers who would overwhelm the open source community with features." So expect this to be a long multi-year deployment.

    2. Beau believes that commercial Unixes are beginning their slow death knell. Eventually you will see two OSes (Linux and NT) based on largely the Intel platform. Linux is driving the cost of the OS to zero so that it will be exceedingly difficult to make money selling an OS. Likewise you will find Linux EVERYWHERE.

    3. SGI has well over 1 billion in cash reserves. This puts them in fairly good financial footing and able to make strategic investments (like the 6 mil they pumped into VA Linux). So they aren't hurting that much. When VA goes public that investment will be worth quite a bit.

    4. MIPS is platform which is of declining importance which SGI is moving away from. They aren't moving Linux to MIPS because SGI is moving away from MIPS.

    These are gradual structural changes at SGI so expect them to take a couple of years.



  • Ok, then give me one example.
  • Yeah, well, but that probably means that anything cool that Nvidia (and I do own a TNT2) does SGI was doing already ten years ago.

    The one thing Nvidia is bringing to the arena is lower prices...
  • While SGI's have been the overwhelming popular choice in Hollywood for doing CGI (as in computer generate imagery, not in the WWW sense), this is changing. More and more of this is being done on workstations running NT with packages like 3D Studio Max or the Crystal Graphics package (I can't think of its name right now, and last I remember it was a DOS app, but someone told me its now NT). Some of this includes some of the work on the Terminator 2 and Terminator 3 movies, The Abyss, Titanic, and others. (Ok, I admit these are all James Cameron movies...but there are others) No, SGIs aren't going away in Hollywood just yet, not by a long shot, but Intel-based hardware is becoming capable enough for production use.
  • GM and Ford don't lay off engineers: they take the higher paid ones near retirement age and offer them a nice retirement bonus and do anything it takes to make retirement seem good.

    Then they replace them with contractors, which don't have to be laid off because they are temporary employees. A lot of GM engineers work for contract houses like MSX International, and more and more engineering work is being done by Tier One suppliers.

    I work with a lot of such Tier One suppliers in the Body-In-White Assembly Tooling community. A lot of tooling work used by done by GM's Metal Fabricating Division (MFD) but is increasingly being done by Tier One.
  • My laptop's of about 1996 vintage (got it cheaply secondhand), and it beats an Indy.
  • hahahahahahahahaaaaa An SGI Reality Engine maxes out at 10 million polys/sec, and thats a best case benchmarked figure. Perhaps that second 8 was a typo? And frankly, SGIs are no longer cost-competitve in the face of add on gfx boards for standard PCs from 3DLabs, Intergraph etc. Perhaps by using technology from NVidia (who, shock-horror, have built their technology solely on the back of the games market), they can continue to be competitive in the face of wicked-fast 'games cards' with geometry processors etc. on board.
  • They still exist; are you implying that their recent change of direction [yahoo.com] constitutes death, or that it means they're doomend?
  • ...(acc. to reports now circulating) Intergraph has thrown in the towel. No more PC's --no workstatiuons, no servers.

    This press release [yahoo.com] (it's also on Intergraph's Web site [intergraph.com], but the version there appears to be infested with non-ISO-8859/1 Windows characters) says that they will "Exit the PC and generic server business, which suffered irreparable harm from Intel's actions.", but that they'll "Strengthen the high-end workstation and graphics accelerator businesses by seeking partners with complementary technology and sales channels for Intergraph Computer Systems' ViZual Computing and Intense3D units.", although I don't know whether the bit about "Focus[sing] on Software and Services" means they'll eventually sell the hardware business off to a partner.

  • Isn't it: Developmend work _on_ a IA32 _for_ an SGI-can! Wasn't people crying that it had to be the other way around?


    LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
  • More like "this guy" just digs SGI. I know I've had a hard-on for an O2 for as long as they've been around. I'd buy one, but the wife would have my nuts. That would be one too many 'puters around here.

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