19 Feb
2001
19 Feb
'01
6:28 p.m.
> products.
As for moving their products to cheaper platforms, is that any
> advantage?
You bet. Ten years ago the hardware for a typical
animation station
was around $75,000 (a high end SGI), then you put around $75,000
worth of software on it, for a total or around $150,000. I now
teach at a media school, where I have a class of 60 students
learning 3D modeling and animation. I need around 30 stations for
this class, at $150,000 each that's a significant investment. Moving
to a PC based platform at least reduces the hardware costs. Over
the past decade the cost of Alias and SoftImage software has also
decreased.
True, it's a lot of fun if you're low on money, but moving killer apps (the
apps that make a platform viable) to the PC platform, you only consolidate its
ubiquitous status. From my work perspective, moving as much as possible to
a PC (or
similar high volume platform) is desirable since it decreases costs.
Higher volume means lower costs. I know that may be upsetting to
some people on this list.
In many ways SGI has encouraged the movement of highend graphics
to PCs by a series of stupid moves through the 1990s. To a certain
degree the company has lost direction, not unlike the process DEC
went through in its last decade. Through the 1980s and the early
1990s, SGI produced reasonably priced highend graphics workstations.
Most of the SGI workstations I purchased in that period were in
the $65,000 CDN range (this is the educational price). These were
good solid workstations, with about the best graphics performance
you could get. The last machine SGI made with this characteristic
was the Crimson/RE (which is about 8-10 years ago). To get into a
highend SGI now costs around $250,000 for some type of Oynx with
reasonable options. This isn't cheap. All the other graphics
workstations that SGI produce are outperformed by PC based ones.
The Oynx is the only graphics workstation that they produce that
can't easily be duplicated elsewhere. Its the only game in town
for really high end graphics, but I really hate the price tag (I'm
in the process of buying another one now), because the price/performance
just isn't there.
The earlier SGIs were cheaper because there were a small number
of standard configurations that could be mass produced. On the
other hand, each Oynx is custom built, so there is no volume
advantage. The end result is a high price, and a less reliable
product.
I bought four 310VGX's at the Alias fire sale,
which was actually
conducted by SGI.
Old m68k machines?