Tim Cutts wrote: > > On 14 Jan 2006, at 5:07 am, Farul Mohd. Ghazali wrote: > > SGI are in the same situation as Cray; the > US government will keep them alive as long as they need support and > no-one else has a competing product. SGI's position being the same as Cray's? You have made the 'CrayLink' :-). After all I think Cray was briefly owned by SGI? From a 'huge budget to even think about purchasing' point of view maybe...But from a product point of view not so much under the surface. The ALTIX maybe a nice package, it might contain "customized NUMAlinks", but their technology is more on the backplane and interconnect rather than the processor itself (my bias:personally I was never convinced about SGI offerings, despite the fact I ran Origins a while ago). Cray might have Opteron optimized systems (XD1) but their vector processors are a different workhorse. If you now ask the question "how many people need or can afford VP technology", the answer is almost certainly very few. But my point is that SGI might be facing some tough times due to the fact that they are trying to pass technology not so unique as "unique", whereas Cray is trying to give you technology that most folks do not need or cannot afford... > This isn't actually that bad a > position to be in. It's the same reason that VMS will never die, and > that HP are being forced to support Alpha for many years. > Another example of over-priced technology way ahead of its time... and eventually, you got the Itanium with the "acceptable" compilers some time after its first appearance :-p ... IMHO only. -- -- George B. Magklaras Senior Computer Systems Engineer/UNIX Systems Administrator The Biotechnology Centre of Oslo, University of Oslo http://www.biotek.uio.no/ EMBnet Norway: http://www.biotek.uio.no/EMBNET/ --