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SGI Graphics Workstations back again


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Thought this was good for a chuckle. Memory Express is a local computer supply warehouse for those who like to build their own systems. Pretty much anyone who builds their own system in Calgary goes to Memory Express. I was looking today and found these systems and thought everyone would get a good laugh.

 

http://www.memoryexpress.com/index.php?PageTag=&page=link&memx_menu=314

 

The prices are in Canadian dollars, but you just have to take 10-12% off to get the US price. (That is another issue I can't believe, the US and CDN dollar are almost at par now!)

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Wow, I don't think I even have the basis for evaluating that :)

 

Are these current systems? I thought the Itanium platform was pretty much dead.

 

And am I alone in being disappointed that SGI is using such a normal video card? Did anybody else get a chance to use the first generation SGI Windows machines several years ago? They were dual P2s I think, and they had a video card with a name that was something like "Cobalt Blue". We were regular customers so they sent us a prerelease sample and it was amazing. We had it running four demos at once, each taking full-NTSC video input and mapping it to a different animated 3D surface in real time, while outputting to a four-screen wall.

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i remember looking up SLI machines for grins several years ago. it was amusing to think about machines with 100 cpu's, and storage measured in Terabytes.

 

http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/configs.html

 

SGI Altix 4700 Supercomputer

 

Processors: 1.6GHz or 1.66GHz Intel Itanium 2, 6MB or 9MB cache, 533 or 667MHz Front Side Bus support

 

Number of processors

16 to hundreds per system

 

Interconnection between nodes for global shared memory SGI NUMAlink 4

* Fat-tree topology

* 6.4GB/sec bidirectional bandwidth per link

 

Memory Up to 32GB DDR2 per module, up to 128TB per system

 

....i have no idea if you could even use a system like this for a workstation, or if it would just be used for rendering.

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They're Itanium machines. There are very few apps developed for them since this was the first 64 bits PC developed by Intel a couple years back. Intel, IBM, HP and some others are still selling Itanium systems. They're used mostly for large scale server solutions and their cost is in the thousands of dollars range.

You can see the HP solutions here, although I couldn't find a price tag anywhere: http://www.hp.com/products1/itanium/

 

Cheers,

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You'd have to be clinically insane to spent that much money on silicon...

With dual Opt X2 64-bits, and SLI (they now have 4 way), you'd seriously need to be insane...

 

But how else can you get a 1.6GHz CPU, 4GB of RAM, a FireGL card and a 19" monitor? You can't just go and get all that stuff shipped to you next-day from Newegg.

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