Silicon Graphics Prism Workstation

[Anonymous]

Hi guys,

At NAB Discreet and SGI had a press release stating that Discreet was going to evaluate the SGI Prism Platform for Discreet Inferno and Fire.

Do you guys know what happened to this evaluation?

Are they going to run Inferno/Fire on these systems?

Or maybe we’ll see Inferno / Fire running on Boxx’s new 8-core, AMD Opteron 4-processor workstation??

Rgds,

Francisco

[michael]

They had the machine at IBC in back room demo’s. I didn’t see the demo so couldn’t comment on the quality of the port, or a planned release date. I think I can say that SGI are releasing a kernal and service pack update that will add support for their new HD video card this month, maybe discreet(sorry, autodesk) are holding back for that(?)

FYI, we have been using the prism products for 4K playback(with the sony projector), and a range of new film products we are developing and they are pretty impressive machines for the tasks they are designed to cover. I am not talking about workstation type tasks here, but if you need 10X mutliple 2K or 4K streams for edtiting, or multi-pipe architecture for 4K/6K/8K etc display, these are the machines to do it…

We used the new deskside dual proc prism to demo our new image prep application and we nearly fell of our seats when we saw how fast it was in comparison to a dual 2.7 gig mac. It was approx 3-4 times faster, and threw 2K plates around like they were 320X240 quicktimes.

Look to NAB to see the new hardware architecture which is really impressive, IMHO the current machines are more transitionary for the media industry. Nab should see that change, and no, I can’t really say much more ; )

[Anonymous]

Hi lanky,

Thanks a lot for the info.!!

Francisco

[michael]

Actually, just after I sent that the following press release came through. http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2005/september/sgi_dvs.html – Confirms the card is available.

The boards are based on open ML which means other video I/O boards are in the pipeline from other manufacturers(Aja,Bluefish), they should pretty much just plug and play ; )

No more DM2/5 !!!! (probably a good thing considering the reliability and cost issues!)

[eltopo]

I guess this means that the transition to Linux will be complete.

I wonder if the new versions of Inferno – Fire will be Linux only or will they still support IRIX ❓

BTW What will Happen if SGI cannot get a settlement with their creditors and files for bankruptcy?

[-k]

…and the itanium is not really that successful either.

-k

[hyrlvlrec]

i recently spent the day with an sgi tech……he basically told me that sgi’s main customers arent willing to pay the top dollar for IR based gfx anymore….that desktop/commdity gfx systems can do most of what the IR stuff can do, but not quite….i got the impression that the ati/prism gfx just aren’t what an IR is

[eltopo]

I think that is not entirely true. The reason is that the IR and the GFX card work differently. IR had a tighter integration to Open GL thus it could make some things run faster than on a graphics card. This is the main core of the FFI apps functioning. They ran everything through OpenGL and hardware while other apps used software (Shake). They worked faster but they couldn’t do a lot of things. (such as 32-bit float images for once)

When it come to textures and using this modern subroutines on today’s cards, they cannot be executed by the IR system.
Also they cannot push as many polygons as an Nvidia or an ATI pro card. And with the advent of multicard systems the difference will only grow.

IR graphic subsystems are old technology they date back to the mid 90’s, and that was one of the problems with SGI. They spent all their money on buyout instead of R&D and when their decisions proved to be business failures (think Cray) they had run out of money and smart people…

[Author]

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