[geeks] Disney going to HP Linux for animation

[Kurt Huhn]

alex j avriette wrote:
> 
> > I personally think the market would support a sub-$5k machine from SGI.
> > That price-point would place it in the same grouping as serious
> > workstations from Dell, HP, Compaq, etc.  Put a serious CPU in it, put
> > some good graphics in it using commodity hardware (think nVidia).  This
> > workstation might not need a crossbar, but it might as well have it to
> > make it homogenous among all the other workstations.  This machine
> > should use a lot of commodity hardware, actually.  This could keep the
> > price down to acceptable levels.
> 
> Isn't this what the O2 workstations were supposed to be? How much did
> those cost new anyways?

Yup.  I think you missed the part where SGI has announced that the O2 is
being discontinued though.  The O2 was as low-endian as SGI with regard
to true Unix workstations - the abysmal NT workstations don't count, as
these truly sucked.  The O2 is about, um, $6K new I think - but add the
A/V unit and it rasies to close to $9k.  Max it out and you're paying
big friggen money....

What I think they need is a sub-$5k machine to compete in that price
market.  There are companies out there that are using $4.5k Dell
workstations, so that price point has precedence in the market.  Few
people, though, want to pay much more than that...

> 
> And the problem with this approach is that it would be a serious
> credibility blow for the company if it sucked.
> 

Unfortunately, SGI has nowhere to go but up, in terms of low-end
workstations.  Their last effort with Intel processors made them the
laughing stock of the graphics workstation market.  At least if they do
it with MIPS processors and Irix, or <gasp> Linux, they retain the
credibility of not bowing to inferior technology to meat the price
point.

Personally I dont' know how the could do a low-end MIPS workstation and
be found uncredible - Sun has managed to pull it off nicely with Sparc. 
As long as they match performance with Sun's efforts at the $5k price
point, they'll be okay.

The main thing hurting them right now is software, or more precisely, a
lack of it.  Folks who pay $15k for a workstation are also amenable to
paying $10k/seat for software licenses - but at $5k, the market won't
support it.  SGI is making contriburtions to open source software, but
they need to ramp that up - even if they need to sell the mediapacks, or
somehow cover the costs through retail means.  I would support them this
way if they did.  I really need a decent solid modeler for Irix that
handles booleans and solids without losing it's lunch or making me
angry.  I would pay a reasonable figure ($1k or less) for something that
meets my needs, I don't necessarily need a rendering engine, as BMRT is
pretty nice IMO.

Of course that's just my blah blah blah...

On an up-note, I just found RealSoft3d for Irix
(http://www.realsoft.com).  They don't have an eval version for Irix,
but they do jhave one for Windows and Linux.  Tonight I'll download and
play with the Windows version and see if I like it.  If I do, then I'll
probably buy it as soon as I'm able.

-- 
Kurt
kurt at k-huhn.com