How did NT beat SGI? Cheaper hardware?
Plus since virtually all the animators used Windows at home and where very comfortable with it, the need for support and hand-holding was much less than with Irix.
You probably know this but a reminder: it was a double whammy of scale (network effect): SGI was selling to roughly three markets (video production, high end CAD, and midrange number crunching). NT was selling to anybody, and despite its multi-architecture support, Intel was selling to the same people. This threw off cash both of them could invest in improving their offering.
There is a good argument, though I don't know how good, for Apple to do an SGI with the Mac Pro. Its main value would be a "halo" effect: make the argument that Apple is so technically great that the people with the hardest problems turn to them, so you can too. Also Apple helps bring you the stuff you like, movies and music and such. That was an important argument back when Apple was lagging. If this argument still makes sense it might even worth doing so at cost or even a small loss paid for by the marketing department. But the green eyeshade side of Apple's planning hates that kind of excuse for good reason.
The Mac Pro has some minor benefits in being a practical way to push the design envelope in ways that will later trickle down, though as this article points out it requires investment in areas not otherwise critical, or even important to the company.
The switch to the NT platform in Windows XP was incredible. Of course, a lot of that was lost in teh beginning with the "Fisher Price" UI, and the massive rise of malware, but by SP2 most of these issues were resolved... Windows XP SP2 was one of the most stable and long lasting consumer OS of probably all time.
I wonder if Microsoft could have switched to NT for its consumer OSes earlier, and if so, how much better Windows based computing for most people would have been. Combine that with the Longhorn disaster, and MS lost so many years of precious development time.
It had the new kernel that could compete with (and even outperform) commercial Unix for workstation use, and also the new GUI from Windows 95 which meant it was both familiar and had an enormous range of apps easily available.
Not only was Windows NT 4 enormously better than DOS, but it was also objectively better as a total package than Mac OS 8, the Sun Solaris CDE desktop, and everything else. Open source Linux desktops were still very early.
Windows 2000 (a.k.a. NT 5) was still good and a much more practical desktop OS than the first Mac OS X which had absolutely horrendous performance. Somehow Microsoft managed to squander this lead by focusing on consumer Windows XP and their own endless .NET API turf wars that ended up destroying the credibility of the Windows platform.
The issues were that Windows NT needed much more RAM than consumer Windows at a time when RAM was still extremely expensive, and only a subset of the hardware that would work under consumer versions of Windows had drivers for Windows NT.
However, NT (and especially Windows 2000) was night and day better than Windows 9x.
All these factors together largely eliminated Unix workstations from most of their native markets (3D visualization, CAD, CAE, media) so that category of system just ceased to exist in the mid 2000s.
It was an odd strategy from a company that obviously had no future and nothing left to offer. At the time, I had built up so much animus against SGI for their outrageous pricing and unbelievably annoying FlexLM software licensing that it was amusing to me. Their god damned MIPS Pro compiler spent more cycles checking its license file than actually compiling a small C file. And the FlexLM system was so badly written that it did nothing to stop piracy and any user could trick it into overwriting any file on the system. They claimed to patch it, but never actually fixed it. At least they open-sourced XFS. That was nice of them.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/nasa-gets-sgi-2048-core-itaniu...
The video game industry is so huge that whatever hardware benefits from it, it will eventually crush the professional competition.
If AI is possible today, it's because billions have been invested in making our computers beasts at multiplying matrices.
A single voodoo2 in a pentium2 absolutely trounced the Octane, so my gaming eventually moved to pc and stayed there.
Microsoft bought Softimage, one of the top competitors to Maya at the time. They charged iirc $4k or $8k and a PC to run it would run $4k-$5k
Softimage is long gone but it's what Valve used for the Source Engine and Half Life 2
[0] With the exception of the lower end UNIX workstations which were still better, yet a tad bit more expensive compared to the commodity PC hardware.
This was true early on, as in, early 90s-ish. But in the second half of the decade the balance shifted significantly and by the late 90s, Unix workstations could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being slower. I was doing sysadmin grunt work for a studio at the time and beige boxes ran circles around later generation Octane and Onyx machines.
They were also a nightmare to maintain by then. The market for peripherals and the like wasn't exactly open and there were all sorts of weird servicing deals. With beige boxes we didn't even need a formal procurement process for peripherals like keyboards and the like, we let people buy their own shit and reimburse them within some limit.
Yes, this is true enough as the situation was incomparably better with commodity PC's, with upgrade components and peripherals.
But to be fair, any branded PC was exactly the same, e.g. memory sticks they required were not compatible with the affordable or reasonably priced commodity ones (sometimes even across different models from the same PC vendor), expansion cards (even if made by a third party) also had to come from the same vendor etc, and everything that was branded came with an exorbitantly priced component price list. Compaq was notorious (and nearly universally hated) for requiring special SIMM's that could only work in Compaq PC's and only in a specific model. Procurement loathed those. IBM, HP and Dell were just the same. Then, there was RAMBUS trying to corner and lock everyone into their über-expensive memory chips and stuff (which, luckily, faltered and the company went bust). Again, I am talking about the desktop PC's not the servers.
The situation only changed after the market got flooded with cheap Taiwanese made PC's that could be easily and cheaply upgraded, so the big brands feeling the market force and pressure had no choice, eventually budged and stopped adding proprietory control pins to their memory sticks and stuff.
In the end SGI tried to enter the Windows NT market with its own system that had a unique GPU with unified memory and also used SGI's own firmware instead of a PC BIOS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation
Despite the GPU, it wasn't competitive with cheaper, more standard x86 hardware.
And of course the huge number of people buying x86 hardware meant PC hardware manufacturers could afford big R&D budgets that allowed them to surpass the workstation CPUs and GPUs in performance.
NT wasn't a GUI on DOS. NT was different, not based on DOS in any way. Dave Cutler brought his pet project NT (which was technically Digital IP) with him when he left Digital. NT was new and entirely unrelated to any other project at Microsoft.