More on THE Press Release!

Folks:

At the risk of beating a dead horse -

It strikes me that the most interesting parts of the press release
at:

http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/1999/january/servers.html

is what it doesn't say! Chiefly I find no mention of porting Irix to
Intel chips and abandoning MIPS chips. I seem to remember mention
of that somewhere else. Prehaps they are seeing the writing on the
wall that the much touted Merced chip ain't going to be all its been
cracked up to be and have decided to keep their options open.

If this turns out to be true I see the makings of a real plan to lift
and separate the old SGI that many of us know and love from its
present malaze.

What the Jan, 99 press release on servers said to me was that they
were going to be a serious player in the Intel marketplace and run
NT for the dull and unimaginative while using Linux as their default
Unix OS to show people what these platforms can really do. For
them this is a win-win situation, they get the sales associated
with both NT and Linux while saving many development $'s along the
way. Meanwhile the heavy iron is and will continue to be MIPS running Irix.

If my guessing is correct one wonders what Microsoft and Intel
will think?

Later -

Michael

Robbie Stone wrote:

|  Yeah, I figured there wasn't one, SGI just wouldn't do that, but if you
|  goto www.sgi.com/software/irix6.5/ the picture at the
|  bottom(irix_chart.gif) sort of implies to me that the Onyx2's and Origins
|  will be running IRIX-IA64, now maybe I am misunderstanding this chart, but
|  if I am, then other people might, and you know how news articles come out,
|  I believe that the SGI/HP Cnet article recently at the last paragraph
|  referred to Linux as a language.

IA64 != x86

x86 == IA32

My earlier response, to be crystal clear, was about IA32. Surprisingly to me, some of the folks on this list hadn't heard the IA32 vs IA64 names, and I had assumed that since they had been in fairly common use for 18 months that just about everybody would have known...

Sorry for the confusion.

The statements on the www.sgi.com web pages about IRIX and IA64 are still correct, so far as I can tell from reading the recent press release. Obviously I don't make policy, so I'm going by the same public data that you are.

As far as the comments about http://www.sgi.com/vision/tech.html
now being out of date, yes, they seem to be, and they'll likely be updated in the next week or so.

No magic involved, Merced is simply very delayed and switching the architecture isn't something to be done on one day.

Ralf