
SGI Unveils Octane III Personal Supercomputer - fogus
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/september/octaneIII.html
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davepeck
"Price: Ask A Sales Rep"

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

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ams6110
_Octane III is immediately available with Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series
or Intel® Atom™ configurations. The base configuration price starts at
$7,995._

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vdm
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.

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davepeck
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.

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

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unwind
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.

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rbanffy
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...

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

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

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gcb
apples does.

[http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/248/2041/1588/store.apple.com/Cat...](http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/248/2041/1588/store.apple.com/Catalog/regional/amr/macpro/img/overview-
hero-nehalem.jpg)

we're talking desktop here, remember?

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cpr
SGI still alive? Wow, blast from the past.

Sad to see where Cray came to die.

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mbreese
They were bought by Rackable earlier in the year:
[http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009...](http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/april/rackable.html)

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

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

"infrastruture"

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bmelton
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.

~~~
gcb
I hate seeing PDFs.

(and that include scribed ones too)

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asdlfj2sd33
Trying to un-commoditize a commodity, a terrible business strategy. Apple can
do it, but apple isn't reeeally selling computers, certainly not PCs.

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

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

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

