Subject: And the geeks rejoiced. . .
From: Arthur Corliss (arthur@corlissfamily.org)
Date: Tue Jan 29 2002 - 19:27:40 AKST
Greetings:
I feel like the little girl in Poltergeist II: "They're baaaack. . ." ;-)
http://www.sgi.com/workstations/fuel/
SGI has a new IRIX workstation, and while it doesn't have XIO and audio has
been reduced to USB crap, I have to admit that it still makes me drool. And
the price, wow, only $11,000. That's cheap, as these things go.
And before some of you start complaining about the low speed of the CPU,
consider this:
http://www.aceshardware.com/SPECmine/index.jsp?b=2&s=1&v=1&if=0&r1f=2&r2f=0&m1f=0&m2f=0&o=0&o=1
The fact remains that not *one* CPU gets as much done per MHz than the MIPS
does. This thing hauls ass. Imagine what the Origins can do with a couple
hundred of these. :-)
Out of all the true UNIX workstations I've ever used (RS/6000s, PA-RISC,
Sparcs, Alphas, etc.) SGI boxen have been the finest engineered boxes I've
ever had the pleasure of using. There's no comparable monsters in the x86
world, and yes, Mac OSX w/PowerPCs are completely inadequate as well. It's
not all about the CPU, but about the architectural bottlenecks they have to
contend with as well. From start to finish, SGI builds complete machines.
I've got a new machine to save for. I just have to wait for a version with
XIO instead of PCI. . . ;-)
--Arthur Corliss
Bolverk's Lair -- http://arthur.corlissfamily.org/
Digital Mages -- http://www.digitalmages.com/
"Live Free or Die, the Only Way to Live" -- NH State Motto
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Tue Jan 29 2002 - 19:27:11 AKST