“Sony used SIGGRAPH in New Orleans this week to poop on SGI’s
big hardware announcement of the year. Silicon Graphics revealed
the replacements for its aging Onyx2 and Origin series, using a new
hardware architecture.”
“However Sony’s Computer Entertainment division announced a
16-way SMP system called GScube, based on its MIPS-derived Emotion
Engine chip, the processor that’s in its Playstation2
consoles. According to Sony, GScube will top out at 97.5
gigaflops, although it’s arrived at that figure by multiplying a
single Emotion Engine’s throughput by er, 16, a metric that SMP
mavens will doubtless shoot down fairly quickly. But since the work
these boxes will be doing is essentially pretty parallel anyway,
we’ll reserve the scepticism we’d normally aim at newcomers to the
dicey world of SMP scaling.”
“SGI didn’t provide the customary benchmarks with its
announcements, nor talk up its Linux initiatives. But it’s
been doing plenty of work on its own there, as well it needs to.
Given the huge historic software advantage that Silicon Graphics
has as a platform, the movie business and its manufacturing
customers don’t have too many places to go to. But for more many
more bespoke technical compute jobs, Linux clusters running on
basic commodity PCs have proved well up to the task, and so long as
SGI remains a takeover target, its got plenty more to worry in one
of its most lucrative backyards.”