CompuServe Messages

John, The Indy is an interesting piece of equipment. It has a phenomenal amount of power, but like the Mac, it's GUI causes big headaches in the speed department. Obviously the largest problem that SGI has faced in grabbing the "desktop" market is Unix. So many people in the Graphics industry are both hardware and software idiots. I recently had a top salesman and his graphics guru for a world wide company call me in the middle of the night to help them with a hardware problem. They were trying to "clean" a hard drive off for a trade show the next day. Their problem? They had tried for over an hour to get two directories off of the disk and couldn't figure out how to do it. The directories, they told me, were dot and dot dot. Quite obviously this level of expertise isn't exactly in line with trudging around in Unix. SGI has fixed this problem by creating Indigo Magic, for the most part even a computer idiot can move around with relative ease. This has dramatically helped in grabbing some of the high end desktop market. Physically the Indy is a strong performer and with it's 1 meg cache, it is faster than the Indigo2 on alot of 2D work. However, one of the biggest problems is once again perception. The participants in the SGI market look at it as a "stepchild" and the participants in the PC market think that it's going to allow them to effectively compete with the high end animation houses. Both assumptions are false. A good Indy is going to run $20,000 with an R4400/150, 24 bit graphics, 32 megs of ram, 1 gig drive, and 16 inch monitor. Add another 64 megs of ram for $9,000 and you're in business. $29,000 and you've got a baby Indigo2 without 3D software. Sooooo…. all of a sudden there's once again a big price difference between the two platforms. Outside of the gaming market, I don't forsee it causing a tremendous change in the hardware market. But things change quickly in today's world. At the SMPTE conference in November, Jim Clark said that in less than two years it will cost less than $15,000 to purchase the computing power that costs $150,000 today. That's quite a change. Almost any hardware purchase that can't be paid off in less than 18 months is probably not a wise decision. We depreciate everything over less than 18 months. As to the use of the Indy, it's a very wise decision for those needing processing power. For the price of a single 4 processor Onyx, one can put 10 Indy's on a network and more than double the computational power. This is extremely useful for rendering. This is perhaps where the Indy's shine most for the SGI based operations. Sorry about the rambling. I'm tired. If you have further questions or more specific questions throw them at me and I'll see what I can do. Paul