I suppose I should be resigned to the whole benchmark silliness, where vendors highly tune their own systems and then run favourable benchmark tools – that have no real-world relevance – and compare the results against dissimilar and un-tuned gear from their rivals.

It’s the biggest ego match in the industry, and it’s all pretty sad. Are people really naive enough to buy kit based on these benchmarks, instead of trying out different vendors’ solutions in-house using their own real world workloads?

Regardless, I find the latest press release from Sun touting their ‘HPC leadership’ a bit much.

In it, Sun cites SGI beating FLUENT benchmarks. Yet, the press release doesn’t mention numbers at all. The link to the actual FLUENT benchmarks shows no values at all for the X2250 cluster Sun used, and the main Sun benchmarks website makes no mention of these ‘HPC dominating’ benchmark figures either. Surely if you’re going to trumpet the results, then you should also be making the actual figures available?

bmseer (a blogger from Sun who I have a huge respect for, and who regularly picks apart the outrageous benchmark figures from IBM) should be hanging his head in shame right about now ;-)

Regardless, the Sun benchmark site is well worth a visit at http://www.sun.com/benchmarks/

Silicon Graphics could take a leaf out of Sun’s book here and be far more pro-active and upfront with their current systems’ performance figures.

Meanwhile I live in hope for the day when we have a benchmark that measures the enormity of a vendor’s lies in their press releases. Like the Top 500, I’m sure IBM would be way out in front.

An interesting article has popped up on The Register by Timothy Morgan, where he argues that the tech stock slide produced by the ongoing credit crisis has provided a perfect time for large, established – and exposed – technology companies to take themselves private.

The usual R&D heavy suspects are discussed – Sun, Cray – and Silicon Graphics.

Silicon Graphics, once a high-flying Unix workstation and supercomputer maker, should also think about going private. The company’s shares trade on the small cap portion of the NASDAQ exchange, and it has a market capitalization of $101m as we go to press. In the first six months of 2008, SGI posted sales of $172.9m but booked losses of $74.9m. The company had just under $40m in cash as the June quarter closed.

It could be possible, especially with continued strong government contracts and continued interest from large investors.

What do you think?

The main SGI newsgroups are in the comp.sys.sgi hierarchy:

• SGI/IRIX administration: comp.sys.sgi.admin

• SGI hardware discussions: comp.sys.sgi.hardware

• SGI/IRIX applications: comp.sys.sgi.apps

• Graphics issues: comp.sys.sgi.graphics

• Miscellaneous SGI chat/flamewars: comp.sys.sgi.misc

• Buy some SGI kit: comp.sys.sgi.marketplace

Some SGI related groups that may be of interest:

• MIPS discussions: comp.sys.mips

• Generic computer graphics discussions: comp.graphics

• The comp.unix heirarchy: comp.unix

• Zmail and friends: comp.mail.zmail

• The X heirarchy can sometimes be helpful, too: comp.windows.x

Archives of comp.sys.sgi can be found here:

• ftp://ftp.sgi.com/comp.sys.sgi/

• http://hornet.mmg.uci.edu/~hjm/projects/sgi.wais.html – currently appears to be dead :-(

Archives of comp.sys.mips can also be found at these sites:

• ftp://ftp.sgi.com/comp.sys.mips/

This table lists an overview of all the machines from SGI up to the O2. Please get in touch if there are any ommisions, errors, etc.

PM1 – based on a design licensed from Andy Bechtolsheim, Stanford (before SUN).

IP = “Inhouse Processor”

This section of the site contains an overview of various machines produced by SGI. There are also links to other sites that have more detailed information about each machine.

For a complete overview of the entire Silicon Graphics product line, up to early O2s, you want to look at the Model Overview page.

At the moment there are summaries/tech info for:

• Indy

• Challenge S

• Indigo 2

• Origin 200

• Octane

You should also look at Ian Mapleson’s SGI Tech pages for lots more information – especially for performance comparisons between different models.

Ian not only has an excellent Indy buyer’s guide, but also one for the Indigo2 – required reading if you’re looking at one of those machines. Word is some of Ian’s CFT is taken up with an Octane buyer’s guide too ….

SGI’s legacy product page for earlier MIPs machines can be found at http://www.sgi.com/products/legacy/mips.html

If you have any extra information about the machines listed here, would like to see a summary for particular SGI machine, or have spotted any errors, please get in touch.

You might also want to look at the Periodic Tables for an idea of how various machines fit to SGI’s product lineup.