Dwight Meglan (dwight++at++merl.com)
Fri, 8 Jan 1999 08:13:39 -0500
I doubt that it runs on the SGI PC -- no device drivers for all the
excellent, unique (unanounced till Monday ;-) subsystems inside it. I
would love to hear SGI say that they will have another OS other than
NT on the box, but I won't hold my breath on that one. Seems that the
box is targeted at only non-realtime cad/cam and graphics
design/modeling/animation applications.
You want realtime use IRIX (i.e. expensive hardware) or use a generic
PC and linux RT/your favorite RTOS (i,e, cheap hardware but no SGI
development libraries/tools/etc. that we know and know how to work
with/around ;-) Note that my criteria here is skewed toward high-end
graphics cards and at least 4 cpus.
For the forseeable future (meaning the next year maximum) I see only
these alternatives for those of us faced with firm price restrictions
on our products:
1) Keep using IRIX-based SGI hardware and hope we don't go out of business
2) Move to another PC-type box with an RTOS and walk away from SGI
for good (and deal with finding an OpenGL board supported by the RTOS
that has all the high-end hardware features we use on SGI's)
3) Use SGI PC's with NT and hope it sort of works well enough and our
customers don't revolt and not buy it (and then we go out of business)
3a) Use "pick your flavor of pc" with NT and the rest in #3 applies
(save some money maybe but might get more support problems)
3b) #3 or #3a and add one of the "realtime" extensions to NT and rest
of #3 applies (plus the added joy of possibly having multiple vendors
point fingers at each other when nasty low level things go wrong)
4) Avoid all the hassle and find another business ;-)
Not a set of alternatives to give you that warm fuzzy feeling...
--dwight
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dwight Meglan, PhD Mitsubishi Electric
Lead, Medical Applications Group Information Technology Center America
dwight++at++merl.com 201 Broadway, 8th Floor
http://www.merl.com Cambridge, MA 02139
617 621 7522 / 7550:fax
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