Two top execs at the high-end computing pioneer explain how the troubled company’s turnaround strategy is going. Silicon Graphics (SGI ) was one of Silicon Valley’s computing pioneers. It invented much of the visualization and graphics technology used today by the Defense Dept., Hollywood, and the medical industries for manipulating vast amounts of complex data and for working in graphics-rich computer environments.
SGI: A “Much Simpler” Company
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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While most people here are unlikely to be buying an Onyx II anytime soon; Apple is following after SGI technologically. The SGI technology of the 90’s is the Apple technology of the 00’s. When people why create a desktop as heavy weight as Aqua; its to run on today’s PCs what people ran in the mid 90’s on SGI servers things like 3D visualization systems and multiple video streams.
> The SGI technology of the 90’s is the Apple technology of the 00’s
This is completely wrong. SGI had FAST servers and workstations in the ’90s, faster than the rest. Apple has SLOWER machines *today* than the Pentium4/AthlonXP desktops that everyone can buy off the shelf everywhere.
There is absolutely no comparison. SGI was ahead of its time, hardware-wise and multimedia software-wise in the ’90s. Apple’s hardware today is NOT.
Excuse me, but you probably mean that MacOSX has some good multimedia software that does what SGI did for Hollywood in the 90s. Yes, this is valid, but only this. Not the hardware part (which was the main strenght of SGI).
However today, the “sgi market” has spread itself to Linux, WinNT/2k/XP and OSX. OSX did not inherit all the SGI users. Windows inheritted most of them.
BTW, I might have interpretted your comment wrongly. I really do not understand some of your sentences…
I think he just means the 3D, video and motion picture market in general.
Uh? I understood his statement that way, the performance Apple has today is the performance Silicon Graphics had in the nineties, as in, Apple is ten years behind SGI
OK obviously my post wasn’t terribly clear. The direction Apple is moving in is to allow this decades Apple PCs to do what the high end workstation were during around the mid 90’s. For example:
A strong focus in the window manager on optomized graphics: Quartz Extreme, OpenGL integration, Quicktime running natively. In particular this gives Apple two key features which aren’t present in PCs:
1) Strong support for multiple video streams (an even so so Mac with a good video card and OSX 10.2 can do 4 video streams)
2) Strong support for 3D visualization.
Tesmako was right in understanding what I was saying. Absolutely what you got for $30k ’95 from SGI is what you are getting for $4k in ’02 and what will be mainstream by ’05. That is huge progress.
I certainly agree with Eugena that SGI used very expensive motherboards and Apple doesn’t, Apple is trying instead to offload a great deal of the work to a graphical subsystem. The same way SGI offloaded work to graphical subsystems and storage subsystems in their Onyx line.
If by 2010 the iMac is offering people ’95 Onyx2 level performance on the desktop Apple will have genuinely created a whole new paradigm of mainstream computing. That’s the direction I think they are going in. Aqua is much heavier and slower than XP because Apple is laying the tracks down for real progress. That progress will leave them a decade ahead of where Windows is.
jbolden1517: 1) Strong support for multiple video streams (an even so so Mac with a good video card and OSX 10.2 can do 4 video streams)
2) Strong support for 3D visualization.
You could do this on XP pro on a $3-4k machine. Espcially no. 2.
jbolden1517: That progress will leave them a decade ahead of where Windows is.
Microsoft does that all in the labs, rather than releasing a product not really fit for mainstream usage. Longhorn, IIRC, would come with a much better UI, and most likely a better graphical system.
No dis on apple.. I am writing this on a G4 using OS 9.2. But Apple is no where near SGI, even stuff 5 years ago..
5 yrs ago I was repairing Onyx2s. Those beast were 64 processors and running software that edited film called cineon. They took old movies and cleaned them up and put the images back to film.
That was 5years ago
The system is now owned by Thomson and can still only run on SGIs. Why?
Because these are the only system that can handle the enormous amount of data. Apple cannot come close.