Intel Corp (INTC)

[chipguy]

As for SGI, as far as I can tell, they seem to be doing better with their Itanium offerings, then Cray is doing with Opteron.

Selling over 800 Altix supercomputers fitted with over 30k
I2 processors to over 200 different HPC customers in its
first year on the market and accumulating >250 apps with
another 250 on their way from one contract in Japan alone
is successful in my book. Altix sales now brings SGI more
cash than Cray's total revenue which is still almost entirely
non-Opteron based. And SGI just introduced its new IPF
based Prism visualization system that blows everything
else totally away. BTW I really like this news about the new
Bx2 double density version of Altix:

http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&PostNum=2893&Thread=17&entry....

"As a side note,the BX2 platforms where these two sit,reduced
our costs by 20% at 64P and an astounding 70% at 256P and
above :)
This is partly due to our new CR bricks and partly due to the
TIO based brick."

Ouch! The rich get richer and the poor float $60m notes. :-P

Maybe SGI just has better server designers then Cray?

Maybe SGI just picked by far the best processor for HPC,
technical computing, and high end visualization. BTW, if Cray
survives long enough to see SGI introduce Montecito based
systems with next generation SHUB chipset late next year or
early 2006 this already one sided contest will turn into an
absolute rout.