SGI Octane: What can a $30,000 computer from the 90's do ?

Logic's promotional video for Flame shows off some of the things created in it. You recognize some ads there. If you're as old as me and British, you're probably wondering how much this system cost. Well, I managed to find the price of an

octane

. system with flame license storage array, etc. and it came to 399,198, which in today's money is six hundred and seventy-seven thousand nine hundred and thirty-one dollars or four hundred and ninety-five thousand pounds if you just wanted the

octane

without the video card and frame and fiber channel licenses, etc. , which would have come in at a much more reasonable price of thirty thousand dollars, which is a little over fifty thousand dollars today or thirty-seven thousand pounds, so you know, at that parking price, let's go now if sgi were successfully selling workstations for thirty grand, you're probably wondering

what

happened, why they don't exist anymore.

Well, a few things happened first, the PC started to have 3D cards, in fact, nvidia, one of the major card suppliers, was founded by a former technical science engineer, these 3D cards. Initially he couldn't touch

what

the sgi kit could do, but the gap was rapidly closing. PCs were also getting more and more powerful CPUs at the same time. Linux was also an important factor. Most software running on Iris could be ported to Linux without much. Linux also allows you to build cheap clusters of machines so you can rival the more powerful sgi kit. Sgi also made mistakes.

His new CEO decided he wanted to adopt Intel and adopted what would soon become one of Intel's biggest disasters: Itanium. This hurt Sgi by two. First, the Italian was very wrong. He was supposed to have incredible performance and still act like a pig, since the performance gains from him could only be achieved if the compilers grouped the instructions in a way that the CPU expected and the compilers never managed to do so. The very noticeable shift towards titanium also really damaged confidence in the mips based line of machines as people thought they might end up with a dead end system and although sgi changed their focus back to mips the damage was already done. done and in many places abandoned the shipment. to the Linux PC or groups of PCs, sdi had also made some reckless purchases, for example Cray, from whom they kept the crailing technology that they used in their original systems, but sold the rest at a loss and were also forced to sell your CPU split MIPs.

For a time, sgi tried to be a supercomputing system supplier, even moving to Intel Xeon CPUs, but other Linux PC vendors soon surpassed them in the super

computer

market. Sgi entered Chapter 11 in 2006, from which he recovered to eventually go bankrupt. 2008 it was bought by rack systems which were rebranded as Silicon Graphics International or SGI for short and then disappeared in 2016 when they were bought by HP SGI. He may be gone, but his legacy is still with us, not just in terms of movies, games, and television. shows what they helped us do, but as irex's xfs technology and filesystem was ported to Linux and is now the default filesystem for Red Hat Enterprise sgi also created the opengl 3D graphics API and its descendant vulcan, we still They are used in games. consoles,

computer

s, mobile phones and tablets, given its size, sgi managed to have a huge impact on the world of technology and film media.

That's what this video sums up. My thanks to everyone for watching and of course to Nikki and Bunty for lending us their voice talents, if you enjoyed this video please let me know by commenting in the section below or hitting the like button as I have more sgi hardware here than I can cover and if there is interest, I will definitely do more, if you really like this video. You can share it for free with others and if you really liked it, why not subscribe? Subscriptions make a big difference on small channels like this.