Re: [TCLUG:3420] MIPS is dead

[Mark Dalton <mwd@sgi.com>]

FYI, I work for SGI, previously Cray..

Actually MIPS is not a part of SGI, SGI spun off MIPS months ago, although
SGI is a majority share holder, but has announced plans to sell the stocks.
And yes MIPS are used in many products:
	Sony Playstations, Ninetendo 64s, WebTV, various handheld PCs,
	etc..
It is the highest volume RISC chips on the market.

Next, Cray machines are still be developed for places that are concerned about:
	100% uptime
	Real time high performance computing on LARGE codes
		(also those codes they don't have source for.. goverment..)
	Also Large machines are still selling, since PCs still are not
	     designed well for large scale/stability/balance..
		- I/O
		- Memory Bandwidth
		- Overloading, great work horses.

    I complete agree, (no one could deny) market share continually shrinks
    and will eventually be gone.

Next, as you have probably noticed in all of the press releases, is that
SGI workstations have only cost $6000 and up for the last 2 years, and the
new SGI Visual Workstations (Intel/MS NT), start at ~$3500.
And other news from SGIs CEO..
  http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990104S0013
  The comment I care about most:
  Q. Do you have any Linux plans? 

  A. Linux is increasingly important. I can't go on
     a customer visit without somebody asking about
     Linux. Basically, people want the robustness of
     Unix, but they want a more vendor approach to it.
     We will look at it, and I believe we will have some
     announcements about that in the future. 


Smaller will continue to be pushed, that is nothing new, and will continue
to happen..  Also building balanced systems will continue to be a priority
for servers, and real computing..
	450Mhz buys very little when memory is slow, BUS speeds are outdated,
	     (poor memory bandwidth)
	Small caches under 1MB caches

But computing can be done, a friend of mine funding for a large cluster
just got okayed officially.  (128 CPUs, 50-80GB RAM).  I will be going
out to Princeton to set it up, and it will do large computing and rendering.
(from codes in our good old days on the Cray T3Ds [Dec Alpha MPPs] and
 the Cray T3Es [ (1024) 600 Mhz Dec Alphas in MPP system]). FAST system..

It will be a interesting year... I hope to see more Linux on small systems
like the PalmPilots, and other handhelds, specifically we will hopefully
see more VoiceRecognition software in Linux (since that is likely a
general public growth market for handheld, appliance and laptop areas).

Mark
-- 
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