SGI opts for Woodcrest over AMD

SILICON GRAPHICS (SGI) has plumped for Intel's ‘Woodcrest' Xeon 5100 processor as its chip of choice to power a new family of Linux servers due to be announced at the end of June and ship in July.

SGI entered Chapter 11 US bankruptcy protection recently but sees a route out of its troubles through its heritage of expertise in high-performance computing combined with a new focus on lower-cost boxes than have been traditional for the one-time Unix giant.

In a briefing with UK press last night, SGI CEO Dennis McKenna explained why he was taking the Intel route.

"Woodcrest, we believe, will win the new fashion show," he predicted. “AMD has won the past fashion show. If you go out and ask the sales people they say ‘You've got to have an Opteron box.' But we believe Woodcrest has compelling advantages."

SGI will outsource motherboard production for the design and will focus on final assembly and consulting services in effort to get deeper penetration into its existing accounts.

"We were addressing a shrinking part our customers' spend," he said. “We can move from serving 20 percent of their spend to 80 percent. The enterprise is no longer just transaction-based. They're dealing with bigger data sets and the ability to access, analyse and transform is becoming a requirement. We have domain knowledge here."

As well as having appropriate consulting skills, SGI plans in the longer term to take advantage of its Numa-based shared-memory architecture.

The firm is open about the future of Linux distributions but is concentrating for now on Red Hat and Novell Suse.

Although he rejected suggestions of a SCO-like strategy, McKenna said there was also potential for extracting more value from SGI intellectual property.

"In my second week on the job I had legal counsel sending out letters," he added.

Separately, SGI's chief said that the Chapter 11 move had been "a positive event".

"Before we declared Chapter 11 there was always a level of uncertainty about the future of SGI. We looked at strategic options with buyers and venture firms and they all said ‘we can't take on this level of debt'."

Possible options including selling stakes in spin-off SGI IP-based businesses in fields such as visualisation, flat-panel screens and decision-support technologies. µ