OT- Re: [rescue] cray sx-6

[Claude.W]

Hi

I know someone who was working for NEC supercomputers in Canada. I am trying
to recall stuff I was told a few months ago so this could be wrong but:

He sent me an email a while back saying they would now be working for Cray,
that Cray after talks agreed they would be selling/servicing NEC
supercomputers in Canada (I dont know about US status...they also laid off a
good part of their staff at this guys office in the transition...)

What  I was told was that Cray had accused NEC of "dumping" the
supercomputers (a while back) and Cray had "won" their point and NEC was
being imposed xxx% duty on any machine sold in the US (I dont know if this
applied to Canada to)

So NEC in the US was not a good competitor to Cray with the big "duties"
being added to the cost of the NEC machines. I think with this agreement,
NEC machines sold by CRAY will not have the duties imposed anymore.

I was told that NEC supercomputers were far superior to the Cray equivalents
in cost/performance. With the high cost of R&D I can only imagine Cray was
being "killed" by the high performance and low cost of the NEC
competitor...and they were "loosing the battle" in these hard economic
times...

Now it would make sense that Cray R&D would be pointed in another direction
(but what?) or simply eliminated and perhaps the CRAY line dropped
eventually??? But thats just my speculation...

Claude
http://computer_collector.tripod.com



----- Original Message -----
From: "Joshua D Boyd" <jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 10:00 AM
Subject: [rescue] cray sx-6


> Slightly off topic, but I don't think anyone real really care.
>
> Cray recently annouced that they will be rebranding the NEC SX-6.  Now,
> from what I can find, the SX-6 is a vector machine, like the SV-2 (also
> from Cray).  Does anyone have any idea why it makes sense to be pushing a
> competing vector machine next to your own?  Some people (who probably
> don't know anything) are saying it indicates the death of the US
> supercomputer market, although I couldn't have said that Japan had any
> more of a market than we do.
>
> --
> Joshua D. Boyd
> _______________________________________________
> rescue maillist  -  rescue at sunhelp.org
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