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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 ar

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.
- ehvatum 4y ago
  For the record, I played a lot of Creeper CTF mod quakeworld on my Octane MXE. I don’t even want to remember what that machine cost me. Unfortunately, the impact graphics chipset the MXE used in a 4x SLI-like configuration had an issue with sub texture support that kept frame rates in the 20 FPS range. A single voodoo2 in a pentium2 absolutely trounced the Octane, so my gaming eventually moved to pc and stayed there.

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.

ehvatum 4y ago
For the record, I played a lot of Creeper CTF mod quakeworld on my Octane MXE. I don’t even want to remember what that machine cost me. Unfortunately, the impact graphics chipset the MXE used in a 4x SLI-like configuration had an issue with sub texture support that kept frame rates in the 20 FPS range. A single voodoo2 in a pentium2 absolutely trounced the Octane, so my gaming eventually moved to pc and stayed there.