SGI Unveils Octane III Personal Supercomputer | Hacker News Reader

SGI Unveils Octane III Personal Supercomputer

sgi.com

20 pointsfogus21 comments

"Price: Ask A Sales Rep"

In a past life, I was a full-time engineer at SGI. Have they learned nothing?

Octane III is immediately available with Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series or Intel® Atom™ configurations. The base configuration price starts at $7,995.

In this day and age, I expect and demand to be allowed to create a shopping cart with the config of my choice to see how much it would cost, and then abandon it at the last moment.

Exactly.

As it turns out, SGI played the "price for base config" game back in the 90s, too.

It _was_ a game: nobody wanted the base configuration, and two customers purchasing non-base configs were hardly guaranteed an identical price.

And the base configuration must be this one:

"One dual-socket, Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based workstation with advanced NVIDIA graphics and/or GP-GPU card support"

So I basically get a regular workstation for $8k ?!

From the photo on the product page this looks like it's basically a desktop blade server.

A new computer from SGI? Almost made me look at my calendar to see if it's April's Fools time, heh. This looks ... I don't know, pretty heavy-weight with up to 80 cores on the desktop. Not sure why you'd want an 80-core server machine on your desk, though.

Video processing; simulation; monitoring all your social networking feeds & graphing them :-)

Like I said on Twitter. It's boxy, gray, and x86-based but, at least, it runs Linux and is an SGI.

I want one.

They could have used some plastic to make it prettier...

"It's boxy, gray, and x86-based"

So is the Apple's Mac Pro but no one thinks it needs any plastic decorations.

apples does.

http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/248/2041/1588/store.apple.com/Cat...

we're talking desktop here, remember?

3d rendering, video compositing, all kinds of science. I'd like one, though I'm not an advanced enough user to make the most of that power. It's very interesting that there's an Atom configuration - I would never have thought anyone would seriously stack up Intel's cheapie processor for cluster work. But with multi-core friendly software these days, it makes a lot of sense from a price-performance point of view.

$8k is not bad pricing either, although looking at the configurations I suspect that's the dual Xeon with a Tesla card (or two) from NVidia. In the meantime, you can pick up decommissioned Altix servers on eBay at surprisngly affordable prices.

SGI still alive? Wow, blast from the past.

Sad to see where Cray came to die.

They were bought by Rackable earlier in the year: http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009...

There's something sad about the fact that there's a typo on the specs page:

http://www.sgi.com/pdfs/4177.pdf

"infrastruture"

I dunno if it's just me, but for the anal-retentive bastard in me, I ESPECIALLY hate seeing typos in PDF. Inexplicably, I am much more forgiving of them on web pages, as in HTML files and the like.

There's a sense of permanence to a PDF that just makes the mistake all the more heinous.

I hate seeing PDFs.

(and that include scribed ones too)

Trying to un-commoditize a commodity, a terrible business strategy. Apple can do it, but apple isn't reeeally selling computers, certainly not PCs.

Convenient how there's no memory architecture & bandwidth numbers. :-(

It's a Nehalem Beowulf cluster; the same thing everyone else is selling.

Can it directly drive my 1600SW monitor with OpenLDI? Could revitalize the whole market for those.

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