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RE: [TCLUG:3420] MIPS is dead



[Brad De Jong:  No harm no foul.]

(Consider the following as prefaced IMHO)...

SGI has good hardware, and pretty good software. What's happening to them
is what happened to Cray previously. The guys below
you figure out how to get fast enough that they kill you on
price/performance. Your market shrinks, migrating to their market. Soon,
your
hardware is priced too high for what the market expects and your technical
assets become obsolete.

Anyway, I have a friend who worked at Digital (in Seattle area?)  for a
while who says that morale is very
low there. I think that they expect to be killed eventually by Compaq not
wanting to support the Alpha
development beyond Merced. I think that Digital was bought so that Compaq
could get into the workstation
market, but once they're in, Digital folks are expendable. I remember
attending an engineering software conference
where Compaq was the only PC vendor (touting PC workstations). They want
market share and mind share, but seem to
have decided not to try to stray too far from Intel.

FYI, MIPS was building the R10K for use in Nintendo too, which allowed them
to be the 2nd largest
chip in use (way ahead of Alpha, PPC, etc.). If SGI couldn't justify
further development after R12K with the
Nintendo chip volume backing them up, I don't know how Compaq can justify
keeping the Alpha going. It costs
lots of money for Compaq to support  two different computer architectures.
That's another thing that Cray learned the hard way
(Cray-2 line vs Cray XMP/YMP line).

This economies-of-scale thing is depressing, but inexorable. I always
considered the PPC architecture (and RISC in general) to be technologically
superior.
I watch with amazement as an inferior  CISC architecture wins out in the
marketplace.





Brad DeJong <1796@mn3.lawson.lawson.com> on 01/15/99 05:02:00 PM

Please respond to tclug-list@listserv.real-time.com

To:   "tclug-list@listserv.real-time.com"
      <tclug-list@listserv.real-time.com>
cc:    (bcc: Brad C Elkin)
Subject:  RE: [TCLUG:3420] MIPS is dead




Brad, sorry about the misattribution on the " I guess the market prefers
backward compatability to innovation..." line in my last post.  That's
what I get for using cut-and-paste.

I think Digital (Compaq, Digipaq) has a chance with the Alpha.  They've
got a solid source in Samsung and there are a number of generic
motherboards available at a reasonable cost for NT and Linux.  They've
got to increase their volume though to have a long term chance
competitively.  I think they made an astute decision by supporting Linux
on Alpha early in the game.  I wish Apple had chosen the Alpha rather
than the PPC though.


 ----------
From:  Brad_C_Elkin@notes.seagate.com
Sent:  Friday, January 15, 1999 4:17 PM
To:  tclug-list@listserv.real-time.com; Brad DeJong
Subject:  Re: [TCLUG:3420] MIPS is dead



SGI couldn't afford to compete against Intel, just like everyone else
except IBM and Sun. (And who knows how long Sun will last...) Even Apple
only has IBM to supply PPC chips, Motorola having bailed a while ago.

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