6 ms·

The sun C compiler was pulled in an era where the Unix workstations were (1) very clearly superior to PCs and (2) available with steep .edu discounts. By 2000,

The sun C compiler was pulled in an era where the Unix workstations were (1) very clearly superior to PCs and (2) available with steep .edu discounts. By 2000, the Unix workstation were not much faster outside of 3D hardware and floating points and the discounted price was well above the "equivalent" PC costs. By 2005, the PCs had exceeded Unix workstations in every way. The line is kinda blurry in my head but basically a 2004 vintage AMD CPU could do in software (using MesaGL) roughly the same OpenGL performance as a '98 vintage O2 could do with a decent frame buffer. Once the nVidia drivers became ubiquitous, that PC ran circle around all of our SGIs except for the Octane2s (at a 10:1 price differential.) By 2006, we were down to a single Octane2 with a busted frame buffer being kept to avoid relicensing a numerical package for $$$$.

ska 12y ago
I want to say my quote comparison came from '96, but I could be off a bit. At any rate, the unix vendors still all had pretty significant hardware advantages over even the beefiest PC ... but the bang/buck was already pretty painful. We had systems developed on Sun, but we couldn't afford to deploy them on Sun hardware. After briefly flirting with the idea that SunOS x86 would be a viable path, we gave up and moved to linux on commodity hardware. It was a new enough thing to do (in the market we were in) that we got a few raised eyebrows, but it turned out to be the right decision.
- acveilleux 12y ago
  Yep, without .edu discount, by the time the P-Pro (mid/late 90s) came out the value proposition was really bad. For integer performance RISC had no benefits left by 1996-1997. 300Mhz P2 (in a Compaq workstation) was at parity with a 250Mhz R10k (SGI O2). The P2 as a fully assembled system was priced less than the R10k CPU alone. Only the huge amount of cash available to dot-coms propped up Sun then. With all the "you need sun servers for dot-coms" beliefs. My current employer made the same call (Linux on commodity PC) around the same time for the same reasons. It took ~8-10 years for competitors to stop using the fact it was Linux based for FUD. Now the only issue we get is Windows-only shop (very common in our industry) complaining that we're the only non-Windows system they use.
  - mopo2000 12y ago
    RISC kept up longer, MIPS just dropped early. Alpha and PowerPC kept up longest. In fact even now POWER8 beats x86.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    Only the huge amount of cash available to dot-coms propped up Sun then. With all the "you need sun servers for dot-coms" beliefs. I wonder if Sun would have been better off if this didn't happen.
    - gaius 12y ago
      Almost certainly. Sun kit was very reliable (there's more to building a server than putting a PC in a rackmount case) and for 5 or 10 years after the dotcom bust, they were competing with their own second-hand kit at fire sale prices, which was still perfectly good for the job it was sold for.
rprospero 12y ago
I remember, in 2003, going to a tech demo being put by SGI at our university. It was obvious that they'd been running this same demo for years, in part because some of their showcase graphics would have looked dated on my friend's Xbox. I knew from classmates that they're hardware was capable of more than was being shown, but I also got the feeling that they'd stopped pushing the envelope.
- acdha 12y ago
  The other thing to remember is that SGI had gone through their disastrous pivot to a custom (i.e. unsupportable) version of Windows and switching to Intel's then-architecture of the future (Itanium), which was a huge write-off even for Intel[1]. That soaked up a huge amount of resources just to catch up to their existing products and, worse, was a message to their existing customers that the old SGI hardware was a dead-end and the new stuff was unproven, which lead most of them to migrate to standard PCs to avoid being locked into the fate of a single vendor. It's possible that things could have been very different with better senior managers who could limited the number of simultaneous risky transitions or recognized that semiconductor economics would quickly give high-volume “toy” 3D accelerators a huge advantage over niche workstation hardware. 1. Seriously, check out the sales graphs – this is staggering flop given how much hype the entire industry got about Itanium and VLIW being the way, truth and light going forward: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#mediaviewer/File:Itanium_Sales_Forecasts_edit.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#mediaviewer/File:Itaniu...

ska 12y ago

I want to say my quote comparison came from '96, but I could be off a bit. At any rate, the unix vendors still all had pretty significant hardware advantages over even the beefiest PC ... but the bang/buck was already pretty painful. We had systems developed on Sun, but we couldn't afford to deploy them on Sun hardware. After briefly flirting with the idea that SunOS x86 would be a viable path, we gave up and moved to linux on commodity hardware. It was a new enough thing to do (in the market we were in) that we got a few raised eyebrows, but it turned out to be the right decision.

acveilleux 12y ago
Yep, without .edu discount, by the time the P-Pro (mid/late 90s) came out the value proposition was really bad. For integer performance RISC had no benefits left by 1996-1997. 300Mhz P2 (in a Compaq workstation) was at parity with a 250Mhz R10k (SGI O2). The P2 as a fully assembled system was priced less than the R10k CPU alone. Only the huge amount of cash available to dot-coms propped up Sun then. With all the "you need sun servers for dot-coms" beliefs. My current employer made the same call (Linux on commodity PC) around the same time for the same reasons. It took ~8-10 years for competitors to stop using the fact it was Linux based for FUD. Now the only issue we get is Windows-only shop (very common in our industry) complaining that we're the only non-Windows system they use.
- mopo2000 12y ago
  RISC kept up longer, MIPS just dropped early. Alpha and PowerPC kept up longest. In fact even now POWER8 beats x86.
- yuhong 12y ago
  Only the huge amount of cash available to dot-coms propped up Sun then. With all the "you need sun servers for dot-coms" beliefs. I wonder if Sun would have been better off if this didn't happen.
  - gaius 12y ago
    Almost certainly. Sun kit was very reliable (there's more to building a server than putting a PC in a rackmount case) and for 5 or 10 years after the dotcom bust, they were competing with their own second-hand kit at fire sale prices, which was still perfectly good for the job it was sold for.

rprospero 12y ago

I remember, in 2003, going to a tech demo being put by SGI at our university. It was obvious that they'd been running this same demo for years, in part because some of their showcase graphics would have looked dated on my friend's Xbox. I knew from classmates that they're hardware was capable of more than was being shown, but I also got the feeling that they'd stopped pushing the envelope.

acdha 12y ago
The other thing to remember is that SGI had gone through their disastrous pivot to a custom (i.e. unsupportable) version of Windows and switching to Intel's then-architecture of the future (Itanium), which was a huge write-off even for Intel[1]. That soaked up a huge amount of resources just to catch up to their existing products and, worse, was a message to their existing customers that the old SGI hardware was a dead-end and the new stuff was unproven, which lead most of them to migrate to standard PCs to avoid being locked into the fate of a single vendor. It's possible that things could have been very different with better senior managers who could limited the number of simultaneous risky transitions or recognized that semiconductor economics would quickly give high-volume “toy” 3D accelerators a huge advantage over niche workstation hardware. 1. Seriously, check out the sales graphs – this is staggering flop given how much hype the entire industry got about Itanium and VLIW being the way, truth and light going forward: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#mediaviewer/File:Itanium_Sales_Forecasts_edit.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#mediaviewer/File:Itaniu...