SGI gives Intel Itanium big leg up

THERE HAS BEEN LITTLE good news for Intel on the Itanium front of late, just retreat after retreat, and a low end market that pretty much vanished. Most vendors agree that it is a niche market, most except for SGI that is. SGI is about to bring the chip back to the masses, or at least back into an abandoned market.

Before the end of the month, it will launch a workstation line codenamed Dorado, but there is no known official name. If you want to suggest one, serious or not, I will pass it along. Dorado will consist of a dual Itaniums, dual AGP 8x ATI R420 based cards, and up to 24GB of memory. NUMAlink 4 will be optional, and it will start out at under $10K. This has a good chance of revitalising the IPF workstation market.

For $10K you get a 1.3GHz 3MB cache Madison, a 'low end' ATI FireGL, probably a T2, and 2GB of RAM. You can option it up to dual 1.6GHz/3MB chips, dual FireGL X3s and 24GB of RAM for those really tough visualisation problems that make a PC fall flat on its face. All this will come close to $50K, a big number for a PC, but quite reasonable for a workstation.

Better yet, Dorado is the first in a long line of workstations. The aging IRIX on MIPS line has a successor at last, and you can even run the old binaries if you don't mind a speed hit. Dorado brings SGI customers a long term upgrade path, and given Intel a serious contender in the low end Itanium market. It's about time someone came out with this kind of thing. µ