I was surprised today to have a link referring to SGI's latest creation passed to me. What are they thinking with this design? It looks like a frickin' radiator, you know, one of those things you fix to your wall to heat your house up. (although if past experience is anything to go by it will work particularly well doing that too)

However, my surprise wasn't at the fact their designs are still stuck in the early 90's, it was at the fact they still even exist.

SGI were king of the hill for desktop 3d design work in the early->mid 90's but they began losing it as regular PC architecture accelerated out of control in the free market. The SGI machines got slower and slower in comparison to their PC counterparts, resulting in SGI deciding to party crash with those awful SGI PCs about 4 years ago. By the time those SGI PCs came out they were already about half the performance of an equivalent priced PC.

So where are SGI going now? It seems they're concentrating on the server/render engine market, but how long is it going to be before scalable Linux systems win the race there too?