3 ms·
It's an old and standard story: High end, niche, special computer hardware is soon overtaken by low end, broad market, common computer hardware. Why? Becaus
by graycat 12y ago
It's an old and standard story: High end, niche,
special computer hardware is soon
overtaken by low end, broad market, common
computer hardware.
Why? Because the low end, etc. has so many
more customers that, so far with Moore's law, etc.,
the much greater investment in progress in the low end,
broad market, common computer hardware
wins against the much smaller investment
in the high end.
Or, as was explained to me once, as maybe no more
than a
hypothetical example,
invent a Lisp chip. Great. When running
Lisp, beat the pants off all the general
purpose processor chips. But just wait until
the general purpose processor chips are a factor
of 10 times faster and then lose out because
the small volumes of the Lisp chip can't keep
up with, say, Intel heading for 7 nm or some such.
Besides, for graphics, where get the big business
volumes, for the high end engineering graphics
workstations for high end engineering or for
millions of bored boys not old enough to shave
yet who just love playing video games?
- yen223 12y agoSee also: the iPhone vs Android phones.
- mercer 12y agoInteresting. Perhaps this is why I Apple appears to be focusing even more than previously on being a high-end consumer product company more than relying on its vertical integration and solid hardware. There might not be room for an SGI in a world of rapidly improving, cheap, low-end technology, but there might always remain a place for a 'BMW/Porsche' company.
- icantthinkofone 12y agoFlight simulators. Back in the 1990s, McDonnell-Douglas in St. Louis made the local sales rep the top salesman for SGI with one purchase in one year.
- graycat 12y agoYes, flight simulators for the US DoD were long one of the main drivers of high end (not so high considering what we have now) digital graphics.
- boyaka 12y agoHaha, yeah, reading through the article (so interesting!) I just kept wondering why they stuck so closely to high end workstations, although these days that is what I'm more interested in. Growing up I was one of those bored boys. I grew up on Nintendo and started getting into the Quake series when my family got a Windows 95 PC with a Diamond graphics card (that or RIVA TNT...I know we at least had the Diamond card later on). The release of the Quake III demo was the beginning of intense gaming addictions for me that trailed into MMOs. Also ironically, my Dad got us the @Home cable internet (from the article I learned the former SGI CEO Jermoluk was involved with!) which definitely helped foster my addictions. Another interesting tidbit, one of the main reasons I chose the university I went to was that I heard about people doing internships at Nvidia. I was lucky enough to do mine there (was/am studying computer engineering) and even more irony, I worked on a technical marketing team (benchmarking workstation graphics) with a bunch of former SGI employees! I remembered hearing a lot about their former glory but never knew nearly as much as I have found out in this article and the comments! Fascinating. These days I have actually moved on to doing research on high performance computing, and I might be looking for a job with close ties to Intel (IMFT~), haha. If only I could just acquire more motivation. Growing up as a bored boy playing video games has ruined me xD