SGI's New "Personal Supercomputer"?
It’s powerful, it’s very expandable, but it’s no SGI. Calling it an “Octane III” is an insult to the MIPS-powered IRIX workstations the real Silicon Graphics used to make. Tons of people call Intel’s Itanium a failure, but I don’t believe that’s the case. Itanium almost single-handedly killed Alpha, MIPS (well, MIPS in workstations, anyway), and PA-RISC. IBM’s POWER platform is hanging around, but PowerPC on the desktop is dead. And who knows what’ll happen to SPARC. Itanium may have been a failure in the market, but it drove plenty of Intel’s competition into the ground by way of buying into Intel’s promises, and letting their own architectures stagnate (technically, in the case of SGI’s MIPS chips, or through a lack of marketing, as in the case of the Alpha).
Intel’s modern chips are pretty damn good, but seeing SGI turning out boxes like this now leaves me wondering what might have been if Itanium had never existed.
