[geeks] Disney going to HP Linux for animation

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 08:41:32AM -0400, Kurt Huhn wrote:
> Anyway, that's a big mistake.  Not that moving from SGI is a mistake,
> but moving *to* HP is a mistake.  I have never seen a greater collection
> of crap PCs than those pandered by HP.  The Compaqs are _okay_ (they're
> better than HP, but I'd never buy one), but HP makes some seriously shit
> workstations.

When it comes to porting you software to linux, if you have taken as
much advantage of the SGI as you could, you will either have to
drasticly rewrite your software to get rid of expected OpenGL
features, or you have to get either a Wildcat 6000 or an HP machine
(or perhaps a FireGL 2 or FireGL 8800).  With the Wildcat, you have to
deal with Compaq, Metro (or was it Xi...), and 3D Labs, and 3DLabs
apparently has no interest in helping you.  With HP, the supply the
machine, the graphics card, and the XServer, which is a pretty strong
argument for going with HP when you need a good graphics solution.

Now, Rythem & Hues is going with Athlons and FireGL 2s, and they say
it has overlay support.  I'm not sure where they are getting the
drivers from.

It would be nice (and perhaps the old SGI specific drivers do) if
Nvidia would support overlay plays under linux, which to my
understanding they don't (but since I don't believe my card supports
overlay planes anyway, I haven't tried a Quadro under linux, and could
have heard wrong).
 
> I'm really disapointed in SGI's marketing efforts.  I'm also disapointed
> in their product offerings.  They really need to bring a *Unix* (NOT
> NT!!) workstation into the lower price-point market, or they won't
> survive the next five years.  They've got the O2, Fuel, and Octane2
> workstations - what they need is a 'helium' priced below the Fuel, and a
> 'diesel' worked in there somewhere too, possibly an Octane2
> replacement.  The Octane2 is a great platform, but it's been around
> since, what, 1996?  They need a fresh product in the high-end
> workstation segment to generate market excitement.  The stagnant nature
> of SGIs products is part of their problem (IMO) in the commercial
> sector.

Actually, SGI has announced that they have stopped production on O2
and O2+s, and will no longer accept orders for new ones after August.

So, unless they introduce something new in the next 10 weeks, their
lowest price point will be $13k for a machine with no video
capabilities (though I've heard rumors of drivers for the Kona line of
SD-SDI and HD-SDI cards under Irix).

At the $13k price point, a Fuel is still not a great replacement for
the O2 due to lack of texture RAM (only 8megs are used) , but with a
little application rewriting, you might be able to stream textures
from system ram well enough. 

SGI really needs a good sub $5k machine.  I don't know that they need
to try to make a sub $1500 machine like Sun did though.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd