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Tell me, do you think your super-duper laptop is going to be alive in 18 years? I'll take not *needing* to replace a computer for nearly 20 years over a slightly cheaper energy cost any day.

Peak draw of my laptop: under 150W, which includes its display. Compare to some power consumption figures for SGI systems. In order to even get a machine which has the power to run modern software (which it won't be able to do anyway unless the software is FOSS because nobody is using MIPS for Workstations or Servers or even video games any more, only for little-adopted netbooks) you have to get your power consumption up over my chest freezer.

I'm completely serious. Google: IRIX Jurassic Park
This is the first link: http://sgistuff.g-lenerz.de/movies/jpark.php

http://sgistuff.g-lenerz.de/hardware/graphics/infi nite.php

You need a DG5-8 card in order to be able to have 8 monitors, screensaver across all of them and all.

I always thought the Crimson was the coolest. Here is a picture of a few SGI systems for your amusement.

... how Indigo is treated these days.

From the colour of the year, the 6th chakra or a hype system to M$ software.

Sheesh.

CC.

Remember to set a static route and add a search or domain line to your resolv.conf, that usually trips people up when they're trying to get a system on the net.

BTW, I wouldn't bother installing Linux unless you're interested in improving the port or just messing around.

For good links try nekochan.net, sgi stuff, and Ian Mapleson's site.

I used to own both an old Indy and an Indigo2, both of which would be the equivilant of an 8086 in PeeCee computing terms..

Actually, no, they aren't. A more accurate comparison would be a P5 series processor at a similar clock rate.

You forget the several previous generations of machines such as the Indigo or the Personal Iris and they were drastically faster than an 8086... To find the first machines produced you have to go waaaaay back to 1983 and the Iris 1X00.

x86ers would like it very much if 64bit wasn't relevant for the consumer, because they're not going to get it for a little while yet, but in truth, it really is huge. The potential for huge performance increases in games (I'm thinking Doom III of course) is massive.

Care to elaborate why Doom III or actually any current non-server-programs will benefit from 64bit?

I've seen simulations of molecules which can suck up all the memory you throw at them (and all the CPU time). You can use lots of memory when doing large-scale and/or high-resolution graphics (poster size rasterizing), but how can games be sped up that much? The most important benefit of 64bit it being able to have more than 2GB of memory and use it without time-consuming tricks like PAE which hit performance hard and in most cases you are better off by scaling down your program so it can fit within 2GB of memory. For those cases with large data sets, 2GB is nice, the more is better. That's why SGIs 6 years ago could have up to 8GB memory (see here.

Now where is a game that needs that much memory? And how can it be fast when it has to use this much memory? A program does not get always faster when being able to use more memory. Memory in most PCs is pretty slow compared to the CPU and recalculating values in a tight loop is often surprisingly quick compared to a memory look-up. And even games like Unreal2 are very happy with 512MB. How fast could a game be that needs more memory?

What usual PCs need, is a fast memory subsystem. No one needs more than 2GB of memory on the desktop. Yes, there are exceptions. But games are none of them. Games use CPU and video card power. And AGP/CPU/memory bandwidth. At least until now (and if it's up to me, for some more time).

Hrm, well, I do seem to recall reading on Usenet more than once that the SGI Origin 2000 double stacks had a little space between the two nodes and that said space got pretty toasty when the cabinet was closed... Of course, this wouldn't be the first time that SGI hardware was abused in some form or fashion...