Future of SGI

Roger Bolton wrote in to complain that we ran a bit on SGI dropping MIPS, and unfairly neglected the good stuff happenin'. Specifically he says " a) SGI is porting IRIX to IA-64, IRIX will continue to be developed for high scalability, true 64 bit, fault tolerant systems. b) SGI has teamed up with Intel to develop new high bandwidth architectures and graphics pipes for IA machines. c) As well as Windows NT IA-32 (Pentium II) machines, SGI will release IA-64 workstations which can dual boot IRIX or Windows NT. d) SGI's servers with IA-64 processors will only run IRIX and will scale to 128+ CPUS using SGI's ccNUMA architecture."

I had high hopes for SGI, but it just doesn't seem like they are really going to matter now that they are trying to just be an uber clone maker with a few extra spiffy technologies. They should ditch IRIX, endorse Linux, and concentrate on awesome hardware and software. High end SGI Hardware/Software running an optimized, open Linux? It would fly! I'd prefer an SGI running Linux to an x86 box any day, they just need to throw their weight behind it and make it cost effective. It would be an excellent alternative to Wintel.