SGI: Discussion

http://www.sgi.com

What do you think?

$8500

Why is this better than HP zx6000 which costs MUCH less?

To be fair, as 'big, roughly cubic' boxes go, it looks pretty fucking sweet!

Although it does seem a little late to be advertising that the system has USB 2, AGP 8x and a DVD-rom as standard.

Looks good so far. For $8500, I'm going to be looking closely at what it's got under the hood, because If it can run more generic Linux stuff, it may be worth looking into a bit farther on down the line as a general purpose Linux box, or for some other stuff.

So far I like the photos that they've got of it, but i can't wait until I see higher resolution pictures and non-stock-from-sgi photos.

Also... I wonder if it "actually supports" the USB2 ports that it's got!

Only dual CPU capable? WHY????

That picture is of the larger visualization system, not the workstation BTW.

So the item in that picture can actually go higher than dual processors

the 17U looking thing that's more reminiscent (size wise) of the more traditional SGI "deskside" looks like it can handle 8-16 ia64's (wonder what happens when intel makes DC (UP [uni-{package, core}]) ia64's, 4-8 graphic pipes, and up to 192 GB of RAM
here's the brocure for desk-cube model
http://www.sgi.com/pdfs/3800.pdf
1-2 procs 1.3-1.6 GHz 3MB L3 (ia64-2's come with 3, 4, 6, & 9 MB L3)
internal SATA, a dvd-rom, 5 usba-2 ports (device support should be good as it's linux)

as for software, the paper specifically lists gnome, kde, and openoffice... sorry, I just have to roll my eyes, as... well, it's about as little as they could offer. what does this offer that sgi's competitors can't offer... a dynamic MIPS binary translator, and probably NUMALink that's disabled... good, I suppose if you're a big SGI shop with a large SGI altix multi-node supercomputer...

*edit* oh, it has two 8x AGP slots so you can have two 32 bit per component ATI workstation cards... although you're limited to 256MB it looks like, because graphics card makers have brought to the public a gaming 512MB card that is totally and utterly pointless, but they haven't brought out, to my knowledge, a 512MB workstation card. I'm not a cad/cam guy, or a 3d modeler or anything, but I'd think that they did that the wrong way around.

*edit 2* and in other news, HP's discontinued it's zx6000... as one ia64 star burns out, another starts to shine... or something

Yes it is... Someone is actually paying attention... About that, happy now?



Right... The deskside isn't though, even if I had a picture of my grandmother in there

That thing is hughe! For only 2 processors and 2 HDD's

Also am I missing something, or there is no sound HW?

As per the software, SGI claims that it comes with Linux ProPack. Whatever that means....

And lastly, why Gnome? Why don;t they just port 4DWM, and with the Irix library translator it would be a nice transition system for current Irix users. But maybe that would just make sense, and SGI can not have that.

My take is that they went a tad overboard, maybe a smaller system with fewer slots... cheaper. The sub $4K entry price would have opened a lot of doors, as in a single Itanium config/Single gfx board. Oh, well...

time to update the Image Library!

Well, I like it. I just spotted it in a Prism PDF, I found this image:


Didn't have any other info then. Dammit, and I actually thought I was the first!

It would appear that my damn SmoothWall was caching http://www.sgi.com/products/workstations/ so I didn't see it when I went on, although I noticed this bit:


Deskside? The PDF says Deskside too, which is confusing, it certainly doesn't look like a deskside to me

EEP! SATA HDDs and IDE DVD drive, a slimline LAPTOP drive at that. [shudders] What's that all about?

ok, the first two shots reveal that its indeed exactly the same chassis as the tezro tower, just with different plastics around it - as predicted So instead of Origin 350 nodeboard there is an Altix 350 nodeboard installed and the I/O midplane was replace with a different one (with AGP instad of XIO, six instead of seven PCI-X slots - the spec sheet doesn't say on how many buses those PCI-X slots are though. That info would have been interesting to complete the tezro comparison..)

I've noticed that there seems to be a lot of blanks at the moment, but that might be because the official unveiling isn't until later today. Maybe we'll get more info then?

I figured $8,500 to be £4,462 for anyone in the UK thinking about one... If only! Wonder how long it'll be before it hits the remanufactured route?

HP did not discontinue zx6000. It's at their website, together with entry level price, warranty and specifications:

http://www.hp.com/united-states/renew/zx6000.html

Entry level configuration for zx6000 is $1999, for SGI Prism is $8500. I assume by entry level it means one cpu, minimal RAM and gfx. Entry level for zx6000 specifications differ from Prism only maby in gfx,..

*HOWEVER*..

..even if you DOUBLE the price for zx6000 and then maby get even dual Itanium2 or highest quality gfx, it STILL costs around twice less than Prism and I don't have to mention that zx6000 can have HP-UX, a true UNIX, and Prism, double the cost, ..eerr ..Gnome! 'nuff said! Make the choice yourself..!

zx6000 uses SCSI and can take the 6MB cache Itanium2 too whereas Prism workstation only takes the 3MB cache models, as well as having SATA and PATA, not SCSI.

zx6000 does use the older FireGL though. Oh, and I quite like Gnome!

Lastly, the link you gave to the zx6000 is in the "renew" area. Renew = Remanufactured = Second Hand

Given the heat output of Itaniums that shouldn't be too surprising no doubt it was also cheaper for them to develop as they didn't have to do too much in way of chipset design. Still the next version of Itanium is dual core and is pin compatible with those, so within 9months or so ye be able to upgrade your 2CPU Prism workstation 4CPU (2 x dual core)

Yeah, and apparently will have up to 26MB cache, as opposed to the 6MB max in the current generation. Will Prism be able to accept it though?

I just realised: Advanced Linux Environment = ALE. I can feel a Homer moment coming on... Mmmm, beeeer!

http://www.transitive.com/products.htm ]

The software that will supposedly allow MIPS/IRIX binaries run on IA64/Linux

Maximizing their return on investment, aka cheap crap in an $8500 (base price) computer in a market where HP and Sun sell proven boxes with good support for 2/3 as much. Or less. This oughta be a real winner. Case looks nice though. Maybe SGI should go into selling aftermarket peecee cases.

Erm, doesn't Prism come with software already to allow MIPS binaries to run on it? Or are you referring to running the same apps on a non-SGI IA64 machine?


I agree, it looks great, but it doesn't seem that long ago that we were discussing how SATA wasn't really any better than PATA at the moment weren't we? And you already know how I feel about slimline DVD drives!

Sure. Like the Indy came with software to allow Win32 binaries to run on it. And oh yeah, they really needed that cheap-ass flaky slimline DVD drive, what with the box being so tiny and all.