5 ms·

How did NT beat SGI? Cheaper hardware?

by leoh 4y ago

pavlov 4y ago
Cheaper hardware, faster CPUs, open OS platform. In the end SGI tried to enter the Windows NT market with its own system that had a unique GPU with unified memory and also used SGI's own firmware instead of a PC BIOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation Despite the GPU, it wasn't competitive with cheaper, more standard x86 hardware.
pipo234 4y ago
I think "NT", here, should more accurately read "the Wintel platform". NT bringing a "modern GUI" to DOS computers (as well as some RISC systems) and intel retaking some of the high end previously lost to Sun, Silicon Graphics, DEC, etc. So yes: price, primarily.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > NT bringing a "modern GUI" to DOS computers NT wasn't a GUI on DOS. NT was different, not based on DOS in any way. Dave Cutler brought his pet project NT (which was technically Digital IP) with him when he left Digital. NT was new and entirely unrelated to any other project at Microsoft.
dagw 4y ago
First cheaper hardware, and later simply better performance. I worked at a small animation studio around 1999-2003 and the sudden price/performance improvement that Windows on Intel + Nvidia all of a sudden offered was unlike any I've seen since. A Geforce 2 Ultra and dual Pentium IIIs stomped all over our SGI workstation at most workloads, at less than quarter of the price. Plus since virtually all the animators used Windows at home and where very comfortable with it, the need for support and hand-holding was much less than with Irix.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gumby 4y ago
  > later simply better performance You probably know this but a reminder: it was a double whammy of scale (network effect): SGI was selling to roughly three markets (video production, high end CAD, and midrange number crunching). NT was selling to anybody, and despite its multi-architecture support, Intel was selling to the same people. This threw off cash both of them could invest in improving their offering. There is a good argument, though I don't know how good, for Apple to do an SGI with the Mac Pro. Its main value would be a "halo" effect: make the argument that Apple is so technically great that the people with the hardest problems turn to them, so you can too. Also Apple helps bring you the stuff you like, movies and music and such. That was an important argument back when Apple was lagging. If this argument still makes sense it might even worth doing so at cost or even a small loss paid for by the marketing department. But the green eyeshade side of Apple's planning hates that kind of excuse for good reason. The Mac Pro has some minor benefits in being a practical way to push the design envelope in ways that will later trickle down, though as this article points out it requires investment in areas not otherwise critical, or even important to the company.
- asdajksah2123 4y ago
  It's always strange to hear Windows being actually good in the 90s and early 2000s, but so much of that was the fact that the consumer oriented, DOS based OSes, were so poor. The switch to the NT platform in Windows XP was incredible. Of course, a lot of that was lost in teh beginning with the "Fisher Price" UI, and the massive rise of malware, but by SP2 most of these issues were resolved... Windows XP SP2 was one of the most stable and long lasting consumer OS of probably all time. I wonder if Microsoft could have switched to NT for its consumer OSes earlier, and if so, how much better Windows based computing for most people would have been. Combine that with the Longhorn disaster, and MS lost so many years of precious development time.
  - steve1977 4y ago
    You could always turn off the Fisher Price UI and switch to Windows Classic style, up to Windows 7 actually.
formerly_proven 4y ago
Traditional Unix workstation vendors made a bet for Itanium and against their own architectures, so in the late 90s / early 2000s their investment into their archs became minimal. But Itanium flopped and the Dotcom bubble burst. The latter impacted Sun a lot. At the same time x86 kept improving massively, mostly pushed by AMD, which also put AMD64/x86-64 in the market by the mid 2000s. Also in the same time frame nVidia and ATI created monolithic GPUs which started to perform better than the proprietary GPUs by SGI and HP. The last Unix workstations from HP actually had ATI or maybe nVidia COTS GPUs. All these factors together largely eliminated Unix workstations from most of their native markets (3D visualization, CAD, CAE, media) so that category of system just ceased to exist in the mid 2000s.
- fanf2 4y ago
  I thought Itanium was just an HP thing? HP killed their own PA-RISC and DEC’s Alpha (which HP acquired via Compaq) in favour of Itanic, which left POWER (still holding on at IBM), SPARC (pretty much died with Sun), and MIPS (dunno, tbh).
  - ehvatum 4y ago
    SGI bet what little remained of the farm on Itanium and even sold a handful of Itanium-based supercomputers. It was an odd strategy from a company that obviously had no future and nothing left to offer. At the time, I had built up so much animus against SGI for their outrageous pricing and unbelievably annoying FlexLM software licensing that it was amusing to me. Their god damned MIPS Pro compiler spent more cycles checking its license file than actually compiling a small C file. And the FlexLM system was so badly written that it did nothing to stop piracy and any user could trick it into overwriting any file on the system. They claimed to patch it, but never actually fixed it. At least they open-sourced XFS. That was nice of them. https://www.zdnet.com/article/nasa-gets-sgi-2048-core-itanium-2-supercomputer/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/nasa-gets-sgi-2048-core-itaniu...
- skywal_l 4y ago
  So to reword what you said, nobody was writing games for SGI workstations. The video game industry is so huge that whatever hardware benefits from it, it will eventually crush the professional competition. If AI is possible today, it's because billions have been invested in making our computers beasts at multiplying matrices.
gfxgirl 4y ago
At the time a single seat of PowerAnimator, the predecessor to Maya, cost $50k-$60k. $30k was for the SGI machine to run it and the other half was the software license. Microsoft bought Softimage, one of the top competitors to Maya at the time. They charged iirc $4k or $8k and a PC to run it would run $4k-$5k Softimage is long gone but it's what Valve used for the Source Engine and Half Life 2
inkyoto 4y ago
The same old story: the rise of «worse is better». UNIX workstations hardware was always miles and miles better[0], although it could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being exorbitantly priced. Coupled with highly aggressive and anticompetitive practices of Microsoft, the demise was inevitable and quick. [0] With the exception of the lower end UNIX workstations which were still better, yet a tad bit more expensive compared to the commodity PC hardware.
- alxlaz 4y ago
  > UNIX workstations hardware was always miles and miles better[0], although it could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being exorbitantly priced This was true early on, as in, early 90s-ish. But in the second half of the decade the balance shifted significantly and by the late 90s, Unix workstations could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being slower. I was doing sysadmin grunt work for a studio at the time and beige boxes ran circles around later generation Octane and Onyx machines. They were also a nightmare to maintain by then. The market for peripherals and the like wasn't exactly open and there were all sorts of weird servicing deals. With beige boxes we didn't even need a formal procurement process for peripherals like keyboards and the like, we let people buy their own shit and reimburse them within some limit.
  - inkyoto 4y ago
    > […] The market for peripherals and the like wasn't exactly open and there were all sorts of weird servicing deals. With beige boxes we didn't even need a formal procurement process for peripherals like keyboards and the like Yes, this is true enough as the situation was incomparably better with commodity PC's, with upgrade components and peripherals. But to be fair, any branded PC was exactly the same, e.g. memory sticks they required were not compatible with the affordable or reasonably priced commodity ones (sometimes even across different models from the same PC vendor), expansion cards (even if made by a third party) also had to come from the same vendor etc, and everything that was branded came with an exorbitantly priced component price list. Compaq was notorious (and nearly universally hated) for requiring special SIMM's that could only work in Compaq PC's and only in a specific model. Procurement loathed those. IBM, HP and Dell were just the same. Then, there was RAMBUS trying to corner and lock everyone into their über-expensive memory chips and stuff (which, luckily, faltered and the company went bust). Again, I am talking about the desktop PC's not the servers. The situation only changed after the market got flooded with cheap Taiwanese made PC's that could be easily and cheaply upgraded, so the big brands feeling the market force and pressure had no choice, eventually budged and stopped adding proprietory control pins to their memory sticks and stuff.
jandrese 4y ago
Cheaper hardware, cheaper software, and PC vendors didn't try to force you into ludicrously expensive support contracts. All in all just way more customer friendly than the workstation companies. And of course the huge number of people buying x86 hardware meant PC hardware manufacturers could afford big R&D budgets that allowed them to surpass the workstation CPUs and GPUs in performance.

How did NT beat SGI? Cheaper hardware?

by leoh 4y ago

How did NT beat SGI? Cheaper hardware?

Cheaper hardware, faster CPUs, open OS platform. In the end SGI tried to enter the Windows NT market with its own system that had a unique GPU with unified memory and also used SGI's own firmware instead of a PC BIOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation Despite the GPU, it wasn't competitive with cheaper, more standard x86 hardware.

pipo234 4y ago

I think "NT", here, should more accurately read "the Wintel platform". NT bringing a "modern GUI" to DOS computers (as well as some RISC systems) and intel retaking some of the high end previously lost to Sun, Silicon Graphics, DEC, etc. So yes: price, primarily.

Maursault 4y ago
> NT bringing a "modern GUI" to DOS computers NT wasn't a GUI on DOS. NT was different, not based on DOS in any way. Dave Cutler brought his pet project NT (which was technically Digital IP) with him when he left Digital. NT was new and entirely unrelated to any other project at Microsoft.

dagw 4y ago

First cheaper hardware, and later simply better performance. I worked at a small animation studio around 1999-2003 and the sudden price/performance improvement that Windows on Intel + Nvidia all of a sudden offered was unlike any I've seen since. A Geforce 2 Ultra and dual Pentium IIIs stomped all over our SGI workstation at most workloads, at less than quarter of the price. Plus since virtually all the animators used Windows at home and where very comfortable with it, the need for support and hand-holding was much less than with Irix.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gumby 4y ago
> later simply better performance You probably know this but a reminder: it was a double whammy of scale (network effect): SGI was selling to roughly three markets (video production, high end CAD, and midrange number crunching). NT was selling to anybody, and despite its multi-architecture support, Intel was selling to the same people. This threw off cash both of them could invest in improving their offering. There is a good argument, though I don't know how good, for Apple to do an SGI with the Mac Pro. Its main value would be a "halo" effect: make the argument that Apple is so technically great that the people with the hardest problems turn to them, so you can too. Also Apple helps bring you the stuff you like, movies and music and such. That was an important argument back when Apple was lagging. If this argument still makes sense it might even worth doing so at cost or even a small loss paid for by the marketing department. But the green eyeshade side of Apple's planning hates that kind of excuse for good reason. The Mac Pro has some minor benefits in being a practical way to push the design envelope in ways that will later trickle down, though as this article points out it requires investment in areas not otherwise critical, or even important to the company.
asdajksah2123 4y ago
It's always strange to hear Windows being actually good in the 90s and early 2000s, but so much of that was the fact that the consumer oriented, DOS based OSes, were so poor. The switch to the NT platform in Windows XP was incredible. Of course, a lot of that was lost in teh beginning with the "Fisher Price" UI, and the massive rise of malware, but by SP2 most of these issues were resolved... Windows XP SP2 was one of the most stable and long lasting consumer OS of probably all time. I wonder if Microsoft could have switched to NT for its consumer OSes earlier, and if so, how much better Windows based computing for most people would have been. Combine that with the Longhorn disaster, and MS lost so many years of precious development time.
- steve1977 4y ago
  You could always turn off the Fisher Price UI and switch to Windows Classic style, up to Windows 7 actually.

formerly_proven 4y ago

Traditional Unix workstation vendors made a bet for Itanium and against their own architectures, so in the late 90s / early 2000s their investment into their archs became minimal. But Itanium flopped and the Dotcom bubble burst. The latter impacted Sun a lot. At the same time x86 kept improving massively, mostly pushed by AMD, which also put AMD64/x86-64 in the market by the mid 2000s. Also in the same time frame nVidia and ATI created monolithic GPUs which started to perform better than the proprietary GPUs by SGI and HP. The last Unix workstations from HP actually had ATI or maybe nVidia COTS GPUs. All these factors together largely eliminated Unix workstations from most of their native markets (3D visualization, CAD, CAE, media) so that category of system just ceased to exist in the mid 2000s.

fanf2 4y ago
I thought Itanium was just an HP thing? HP killed their own PA-RISC and DEC’s Alpha (which HP acquired via Compaq) in favour of Itanic, which left POWER (still holding on at IBM), SPARC (pretty much died with Sun), and MIPS (dunno, tbh).
- ehvatum 4y ago
  SGI bet what little remained of the farm on Itanium and even sold a handful of Itanium-based supercomputers. It was an odd strategy from a company that obviously had no future and nothing left to offer. At the time, I had built up so much animus against SGI for their outrageous pricing and unbelievably annoying FlexLM software licensing that it was amusing to me. Their god damned MIPS Pro compiler spent more cycles checking its license file than actually compiling a small C file. And the FlexLM system was so badly written that it did nothing to stop piracy and any user could trick it into overwriting any file on the system. They claimed to patch it, but never actually fixed it. At least they open-sourced XFS. That was nice of them. https://www.zdnet.com/article/nasa-gets-sgi-2048-core-itanium-2-supercomputer/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/nasa-gets-sgi-2048-core-itaniu...
skywal_l 4y ago
So to reword what you said, nobody was writing games for SGI workstations. The video game industry is so huge that whatever hardware benefits from it, it will eventually crush the professional competition. If AI is possible today, it's because billions have been invested in making our computers beasts at multiplying matrices.

gfxgirl 4y ago

At the time a single seat of PowerAnimator, the predecessor to Maya, cost $50k-$60k. $30k was for the SGI machine to run it and the other half was the software license. Microsoft bought Softimage, one of the top competitors to Maya at the time. They charged iirc $4k or $8k and a PC to run it would run $4k-$5k Softimage is long gone but it's what Valve used for the Source Engine and Half Life 2

inkyoto 4y ago

The same old story: the rise of «worse is better». UNIX workstations hardware was always miles and miles better[0], although it could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being exorbitantly priced. Coupled with highly aggressive and anticompetitive practices of Microsoft, the demise was inevitable and quick. [0] With the exception of the lower end UNIX workstations which were still better, yet a tad bit more expensive compared to the commodity PC hardware.

alxlaz 4y ago
> UNIX workstations hardware was always miles and miles better[0], although it could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being exorbitantly priced This was true early on, as in, early 90s-ish. But in the second half of the decade the balance shifted significantly and by the late 90s, Unix workstations could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being slower. I was doing sysadmin grunt work for a studio at the time and beige boxes ran circles around later generation Octane and Onyx machines. They were also a nightmare to maintain by then. The market for peripherals and the like wasn't exactly open and there were all sorts of weird servicing deals. With beige boxes we didn't even need a formal procurement process for peripherals like keyboards and the like, we let people buy their own shit and reimburse them within some limit.
- inkyoto 4y ago
  > […] The market for peripherals and the like wasn't exactly open and there were all sorts of weird servicing deals. With beige boxes we didn't even need a formal procurement process for peripherals like keyboards and the like Yes, this is true enough as the situation was incomparably better with commodity PC's, with upgrade components and peripherals. But to be fair, any branded PC was exactly the same, e.g. memory sticks they required were not compatible with the affordable or reasonably priced commodity ones (sometimes even across different models from the same PC vendor), expansion cards (even if made by a third party) also had to come from the same vendor etc, and everything that was branded came with an exorbitantly priced component price list. Compaq was notorious (and nearly universally hated) for requiring special SIMM's that could only work in Compaq PC's and only in a specific model. Procurement loathed those. IBM, HP and Dell were just the same. Then, there was RAMBUS trying to corner and lock everyone into their über-expensive memory chips and stuff (which, luckily, faltered and the company went bust). Again, I am talking about the desktop PC's not the servers. The situation only changed after the market got flooded with cheap Taiwanese made PC's that could be easily and cheaply upgraded, so the big brands feeling the market force and pressure had no choice, eventually budged and stopped adding proprietory control pins to their memory sticks and stuff.

jandrese 4y ago

Cheaper hardware, cheaper software, and PC vendors didn't try to force you into ludicrously expensive support contracts. All in all just way more customer friendly than the workstation companies. And of course the huge number of people buying x86 hardware meant PC hardware manufacturers could afford big R&D budgets that allowed them to surpass the workstation CPUs and GPUs in performance.