Subject: Re: CCL:Molecular Modeling hardware

From: Sandra Antunez <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 1997 22:48:19 -0600 (CST)

A couple of years ago in usenet and at the HotWired site, there was some 
discussion as to whether SGI could survive the Wintel onslaught. 
Technical issues such as system bus speed and polygon processing, as well 
as the ability of big-time users to have the actual operating system 
modified to suit their needs made it obvious that wintel boxes were 
precluded from the high end.

At the time I expressed the worry that the low and medium ends were 
exposed, and would soon succumb. OpenGL is native in NT these days, and 
$1000 will get you some fairly reasonable polygon processing power. At 
this point, I suspect the main hurdle to be overcome in porting 
traditional SGI sw to NT is not graphics, but issues peculiar to UNIX 
such as process management, signals and other low-level programming thigs 
that differ between Unix and NT.

NT 4.0 is the first "decent" MS operating system, which can support most
of the functionality you expected from IRIX or Solaris. Intergraph and
others now sell big-time graphics software on NT. SGI-based developers
will have to do the same. I suspect the market will go to wintel over the
course of two or three years to do both mainstream modelling and
parallelized numbercrunching. Toy Story is doable on wintel boxes, the
only thing missing is a port of the software. A note of caution, though.
>From a strictly visceral point of view, NT "feels" bulkier or klunkier
than unix variants. It seems you need quite a lot more memory to get the
same job done. 

Heinz Hemken
[email-masked]