On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, M J Dowden wrote:
> At 10:05 PM +0200 6/25/2001, Johnny Billquist wrote:

> > I guess I'll have to pin my hopes on SUN (I never thought I'd say that,
> > but they are the only sensible company left).

>      Do you think SGI/Mips/IRIX still has a chance? Could this revive them?

Even though I love their hardware and I really like IRIX, I think SGI will
be dead in the water before too long.  They're hurting bad now.  The movie
industry finds some of their systems very useful, but that market isn't
very big.  And nowadays most of the studios (DreamWorks, PDI, ILM, Pixar,
Sony Imageworks, etc..) are moving to using high-end PCs running Linux in
their render farms and in some cases as desktop machines.  WinNT has
filled in some places, but not many sysadmins in that industry will put up
with Microsoft products :-)

I can see SGI holding out for a while yet, with their last gasps in the
realm Onyx2 type systems for real-time work and then in their high-end
Origin systems used by the US Gov't--effectively becoming subsidized by
the gov't.

The MIPS processor family will live on for quite a while, but I think
it'll continue on in the vein of high-performance/low-power embedded
devices.

-brian.