[rescue] SGI and Intel (was: Another fine business decision for us axp-lovers)

[Loomis, Rip]

A few comments based on my limited and somewhat
out-of-date knowledge:

SGI corporately has made several minor and major
"course corrections" over the last several years.
I haven't had an update on this "from the horse's
mouth" for eight months, but the stated corporate
strategy *on the high end* as of a year ago was
to move away from the MIPS architecture and towards
the IA-64 architecture.  One of the reasons (to the
best of my understanding based on SGI personnel) for
SGI supporting Linux was that they decided it would
be better to add necessary features to Linux (which
has been running on IA-64 for a little while) than
to port IRIX/TRIX over to IA-64.

The SN1 architecture (A/K/A Origin 3000) is designed
to support swapping out the MIPS processor bricks
and swapping in IA-64 bricks.  Is any current SGI
customer going to do that anytime soon?  No idea.
Is SGI still corporately committed to migration to
IA-64?  No recent information.  But SGI did at one
point supposedly make a decision to transition *all*
systems (desktops and servers) away from MIPS and
towards IA-64.

Hope this helps--

--
Rip Loomis
Senior Systems Security Engineer, SAIC CIST
Brainbench MVP for Internet Security
http://www.brainbench.com  [Transcript 1923411]


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave McGuire [mailto:mcguire at neurotica.com]
 > On June 25, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> > Hold up a second.  SGI is also heading towards Intel.  
> 
>   Uhh, what?
> 
>   SGI had one Intel-based product line that is failing.  This doesn't
> constitute "heading towards Intel".
>