chipguy,
In scale up machines SGI's competition is overwhelmingly
IBM, not Cray. In HPC the competition from x86 is mainly
low priced clusters using commodity boxes. Cray faces
the exact same problem with cost based competition from
x86 clusters for its scale up systems as do IBM, SGI, and
HP.
SGI must have realized that they can't beat the competing x86 boxes (which are very competitively priced) with Itanium based boxes, so if you can't beat them, join them.
The K8L doesn't change a thing except perhaps the
performance/price flavour of the month in the x86 cluster
commodity box market.
It may turn out to be quite a bit more than that. It will be sitting on top of what AMD calls Direct Connect Architecture 2.0, which will likely help commodity x86 boxes scale up... Maybe that is what SGI is really after, and they are just getting their feet wet.
We will see what happens between now and then (arrival of DCA 2.0), if SGI does not "expire" in the meantime. But regardless, if it turns out to be true, it is an interesting death bed conversion by SGI...
Joe
