Slashdot Mirror
SGI launches R16000
nkrgovic writes " SGI has just launched a new CPU - the long expected R16000. The new CPU works on 700MHz, has 4MB secondary cache and more goodies.
For now the new CPU is only used in SGI's Fuel workstations, but we should expect to see it pretty soon in SGI's Origin servers as well. With new high density compute nodes this should make the Origin's the fastest supercomputing server per square foot."
So fast, it helped me get first post.
Whoo!!
I'm confused. I thought SGI was dropping support on IRIX. Why are they releasing new Irix boxen?
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
Here are some boobies.
I wonder how much one of these baby's will cost
Check out this SGI Box - Modded to the extreme
I'm confused. I thought SGI was dropping support on MIPS, and switch to Itanium. Why are they releasing new MIPS processors?
The new CPU works on 700MHz
taking a page out of apple's playbook I see..
congratulations on breaking the elusive 500MHz barrier!
*chuckle*
SGI is getting old, and it shows.
So they introduce a new, much-anticipated "supercomputer" processor, and it runs at... well...
700 Mhz?!?
It seems that this is yet another area that desktop hardware has exceeded the old stalwarts of the computer industry. While SGI is poking along at 700 Mhz, I'll be running my P4 at 3 Gigahertz, thankyouverymuch.
It's amazing to me that the Government, and many non-innovative companies, continue to buy this crap. Granted, SGI was once important, but it's coming more and more clear that anything they can do, a good Intel+Nvidia setup can do better -- especially when you consider the clustering that Linux and NT can do.
SGI should throw in the towel. They've clearly been outclassed.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
it doesnt run linux nor can it be imagined in a beowulf cluster.. but in soviet russia, r16000 launches sgi!!!
I hate to say it, but sgi hardware has been underpowered for years. Affortable bsd based solutions have made sgi's proprietary hardware obsolete.
The problem is the mips cpu. Even the new r16000 is much too little, too late. Clocking at only 700mhz, it does not stand a chance against the pentium4, athlon, and celeron chips of today which are clocked far above 1 ghz (even the g4 can probably run circles around it!). A good example of the failure of mips is to look at the nintendo64, a video game system developed which uses a mips processor. It was so slow and underpowered that the playstation, which has been out for 2 years before the n64, still had better and smoother graphics. The n64 should have been the final nail in sgi's coffin.
Sgi's main customer, hollywood, has steadily been moving to bsd based platforms for rendering and production. I doubt this new chip will solve the main problem assosiated with sgi: enourmous costs for the hardware as well as the support. SGI's proprietary OS, irix, is not common or standard and experts in irix are expensive and hard to come by.
PC's running bsd are still a far greater value than expensive sgi hardware.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
Uh, can I have that in libraries of congress, please? (Or at least cubic foot of server space / "per 1U rackspace").
CPUs launch SGI!
Hertz is not what you think it is....read the above posts to see what I mean.
:)
I think it's clear that unless you have used a Cray, then the processors you mention (i.e. ANY x86-based) are slow as molasses when it comes to MIPS. forget nintendo. take a look at the Supercomputing Top 500 list, you'll see what I mean.
whether they are overpriced...well, that's a different matter.
I can't believe all my posts get marked -1, troll|flaimebait when the parent post gets no such distinction. Clearly this is a troll post (hell i've replyed) -- thats post is all about the megahertz myth!
a 295 MHZ Mips IV derivative.
So, pray tell, if MIPS CPU's suck so much why did Sony use them in both your precious PSX and its successor, the PS2?
How many people use SGI workstations anymore anyway? The specs for the new chip sound good, but what about application support? Its no use if this is a fast server, if my apps don't run on it. It seems to me that SGI is used mainly in the graphics industry, and there it seems to be losing ground quickly to Linux and BSD based solutions.
more about me
in soviet russia, the Megahertz 0wnz you!
(sorry i just had to post a soviet russia joke for this story as nonone elese has yet!)
fuck you -- first SOVIET RUSSIA post! bah
MHZ means breadcrumbs per hour.
Morgan webb launches YOU!!
mmmmmmwwwaaahhhhhaaaa!!!!!
Iin soviet russia
kat schwartz is hot 2]
blackgasmask wins!!!
I worked all summer in an all-SGI shop.. And I call tell you how far behind they are. The place where I work is specialized in HPC, so when they started in 1992, SGI was probably a pretty good choice, but now for workstation, I wouldnt say its overkill, I would actually say that its underkill. We made a benchmark comparing an SGI Origin and a linux Ahtlon cluster, the athlon needed only two nodes to beat the origin and with all 16 nodes where about 10 times faster... SGIs are just overpriced, for 99.999% (that's 5 nines) PCs can do the job and even do it better and especially do it much cheaper. So their workstation market is being destroyed from under them.
On the other end, their HPC (super-computers) is being attacked from above. On that sector, price is not really a problem, its just pure performance. And there too they are being beaten, SGI just does not have the research power that
NEC or IBM can have. So they are starting to be pretty much behind, so they become not only more expensive (which does not really matter), but more importantly much slower...
Also on the workstation market, their desktop SUCKS, its just a pain to use. They are still stuck in the pre-win95 era... It might have been good compared to win3.1 or twm, but it just is not in the same world as GNOME, KDE, WinXP or MacOSX.
Also, their other strengh where there graphics board, they invented modern 3D hardware. And for a long time the roadmap for the PC 3d hardware was simple, they just had to do what SGI already had, but we have now passed a point where the PC hardware has actually more features then the SGI stuff. The only difference now between the pro and game markets are the amount of ram/cache and those "pro" cards exist on PCs. They do cost $ 2000-3000, but they are nowhere near the cost of the SGI workstation that includes them...
SGI has no future. They have been losing money for years. I have been thinking for quite a while that they where a good target for an acquisition, but now that MSFT has bought much of their patents. It might be cheaper to wait for them to go bankrupt and to pick up the pieces. They where in a fast playing game and they have gotten slow.....
Some of our customers' highest-end workstations are SGIs. (There are also a couple Sun Blade 2000s and a LOT of IBM RS/6000s.) SGI will continue selling IRIX and the machiens it runs on until they no longer make money doing so.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
but they, like you were modded down
Why does everyone hate USSR jokes? Damn the commies! I'd mod you up if I had points to give.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Instead of everybody saying "GHz doesn't matter, dummy" why doesn't somebody quote some real benchmarks? I poked around on the web a bit and all the benchmarks I can find either (1) are out of date, or (2) show Alpha, Intel and AMD blowing everybody else out of the water.
In my experience SGI's are slow but are extremely scalable. With IA32-based machines you'd be lucky to get 4 CPU's sharing memory, unlike the 64+ you get from SGI. Very good for scientific codes but not so hot for applications that are either not parallelizable at all, or embarassingly parallelizable such as Seti@Home or ray-tracing a feature film.
Uh oh, be prepared for people crawling out of the woodwork telling you MHz don't matter, it's the IO rate, it's the efficiency, etc...
Bullshit. This pathetic, 2-generation old CPU is SGI's excuse to charge you so much for their highly proprietary, extremely expensive _shit_. Talk about a monopoly, these assholes have every scientist out there mesmerized with their crap.
Why don't they just use PPC? Use a Power 4 chip? Hell, use a P4 or AMD? Because they want to charge the government $10 trillion billion dollars to do tasks that could be done more quickly on other platforms for a fraction of the price. And they've got cheerleaders in certain computing domains who _let_ them.
Fuck SGI, and the horse they ride in on.
Before evryone assumes that this thing is fast here some numbers to keep in mind:
OK there are no numbers for 16K but here the numbers for 600Mhz 14K
SPECint2000 500
SPECfp2000 529
For comparison
UltraSPARC III Cu 1.015GHz
SPECint2000 576
SPECfp2000 775
AMD XP 2800
SPECint2000 913
SPECfp2000 843
INTEL P4 2.8
SPECint2000 1040
SPECfp2000 1048
http://saveie6.com/
Looks like China has some serious competition on the chip front. SGI is already reaching a whole 700MHz! The Dragon better catch up soon is China wants to stay in business.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
what about a beowulf...
slam
OW!!
slap
OOF
thwack
AAAARGGHHH!!!!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
On another note, I'm not even going to begin to comment on your thoughts on clock speed etc. I'm sure everyone else will flame you over the whole Megahertz Myth®.
I wish there was some there was some way that I could be outside playing basketball, in the rain, and not get wet.
Oh? Quick, everyone with Radeon 9700 PRO graphics boards in your PCs, make sure you have them in tower cases, or something!
For reference, the ATI specs page states:
I guess SGI might refer to actual output precision, i.e. the RAMDAC D/A-converters... In that case, it seems they still have the edge, since the ATI boards only have 10 bits per component. Still, I think that's of lesser value than the actual precision image operations are performed at.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
bfd
..
.. its fun to watch
so you can buy one of their billion dollar
boxes and contend with the joy that is irix
or you can put together a linux farm and do
it the easy, cost effective, better way
you choose
(i come from a Former big-name irix shop
we dumped them to good effect)
beat that dead horse, guys
The R16000 has Out-of-order instruction execution? Sweet! So what was SGI's plan when they made this?
1.???
2.Profit!
3.Build new processor.
I wish there was some there was some way that I could be outside playing basketball, in the rain, and not get wet.
I just don't get it, which makes sense since I'm not a CPU designer or fab engineer. But RISC CPUs (like MIPS and Alpha) should be able to run at much faster clock speeds than the CISC-based x86 architectures.
RISC means Reduced Instruction Set. So, simpler and shorter processing pipelines, less transistor complexit, more cache, more registers, no microcode layer. This should allow much faster CPU clocks, like when the Alphas were running at 333 Mhz when x86s were toying with 100 MHz.
So WTF is with 700 Mhz and PPC chips barely cracking 1 Ghz? Is this simply because of a less sophisticated fab process? Anyone know the answer to this?
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
The are two types of slashdot readers : those who are unemployed, and those who will be because they are using company time to read stupid posts.
The former can not afford that expensive videogame, the latter shouldn't.
Actually, one "trick" to getting high clock rates is to INCREASE the pipeline. The huge pipeline is what's been used to jack-up the P3/P4 clock speeds. It's actually harder to have a high clock speed and a shorter pipeline (you seem to indicate that a shorter pipeline should make it easier to have a higher clock speed).
-psy
Actually output values are extremely important in the Film world where you're often dealing with with 8/16/32 bit integer and 32 bit floating-point channels depending on task.
Quote from ???: "There are lies; there are damn lies; and there are benchmarks."
That's 16-bits per colour in the RGB plane, for a total of 48-bit colour. Most PC cards do 24bit (or 32bit with alpha/Z plane).
Not the width of the GPU!!!!
You're confusing apples and oranges.
-psy
I am very well aware, that, since DoomIII fps and multi-GHz CPUs have replaced Ferrari as penis enlargement, you do not really take care about this point, but, for all SPECxx posted here, why has nobody done a SPECxxx/W comparisson ?
How much porcessing power per Watt does a CPU deliver ?
I would like such a CPU in my workstation, even with ordinary DDR-Ram, no [N]UMA Design or Crossbars.
Decent gcc-3.x support and fair prises provided. Latter one will unfortunately never come true, since it would require mass production and -selling. And as long as your friend laugh at your "only 700Mhz" this won't happen.
For home use (excuding UT/Doom) it is powerfull enough and does not need a 5kg-pure-copper-fan which costs half the price of a cpu and rips of the mainboard as soon as you touch your case.
Honest Question: Are 2x30W CPUs "easier" to cool than a single 60W CPU ?
"...output precision... of lesser value than the actual precision image operations are performed at."
Not true if you're doing real imaging work. How about that fancy LCD monitor you've been eyeballing (or just picked up)? Noticed any of the color problems, especially with dark shades? No?
Then you aren't doing graphics work that needs the display accuracy of an SGI or equivalent.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Bottom line, if you need high precision integer colours, you still need an SGI. Of course, there's not many people who do, and someone will probably be doing it on the PC in a couple of years, so it's looking pretty grim for SGI as that's one of their few remaining technical advantages in the graphics workstation market.
You know what I hate? Wait, what do you like? I hate that!
3 in a row by him!
was kept in the 4mb of cache. That's large enough to keep a small Linux distro btw.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
The R16000 has many significant architectural and memory-related improvements over the R14000A. However, you are correct in that it's not the speed demon that some folks are making it out to be.
But... keep in mind that it consumes far less than 20 watts of energy (and thus gives off little heat) and will eventually find itself packed in with other CPUs into Origin servers/supercomputers. The CPU bricks for the O3900, for example, have 16 CPUs in just 4U of rack space.
SGI's ccNUMA MIPS/IRIX machines are typically used for tasks that are severely I/O bound, that is, their strong point is chugging thru massive amounts of data where raw per-node CPU power is important, but not the largest factor. Somewhat like a mainframe, but with less redundancy and more CPU power.
and iirc you windows can't officially have higher than 32bit(24bit+8bit alpha/wasted/whatever) currently.
the matrox card that does 48(? or was it 42), is actually using a dirty hack of some sort to get that depth on windows..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
A coworker of mine has a pretty wild SGI box... but keep in mind, he hasn't even modded it yet!
Octane workstation
24" HD monitor, 21" monitor
dual R12000 @ 400 MHz
two internal scsi drives
internal DDS4 tape drive
two XIO gfx cards
fibrechannel XIO gfx card w/ external ciprico fibre raid
video capture XIO card
scsi pci card w/ assorted external drives
two weirdo data capture pci cards
Oops, now that I think of it, he does have sort of a mod... he bought an LED lightbar from reputable.com to replace the incandescent bar after it burnt out.
The machine is used pretty heavily to analyze video signals from various bits of broadcast and closed-circuit sources.
Another odd tidbit... he runs a much older version of IRIX 6.5.x, not the more recent 6.5.17 or 6.5.18. (IRIX and its applications and freeware CD sets are updated quarterly). Does the job, I guess, so no major reason to upgrade.
Every post that ends up with a -1 score should have the ip of the poster displayed.
SGI is still in trouble. I love the company, their concepts, their hot rod machines and the supercool names they come out with..... BUT they are in trouble. And Linux is one of the primary reasons for SGI getting into trouble. A large number of design studios seem to have succumbed to the temptation of a cheaper yet stable machine (i.e Linux Boxes). As some other slashdotters pointed out, these guys are using Macs for the artwork and Linux boxes for the actual bull work. I wonder if SGI can reconquer their old customers and charm even more people.
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
The 128 bit precision you mentions is really a marketing trick.
If you look at the pixel shader architecture, you'll find that each instruction operates on a vector of 4 values (corresponding to RGBA). Four 32 bit floats don't really equate to 128 bit precision (more like 24*4, or 96).
In reality, of course, the output resolution (or frame buffer format) is what counts.
As of now, DirectX (including 9.0) supports a maximum total of 32 bits per pixel in the output buffer. Although that will certainly change in the future.
Low UID users Troll YOU !
Isnt MIPS the company of the RXXXX chips? AFAIK SGI only uses them for their Machines (and Cobalt used to for their Qube/Raqs)
------- The last Sig. got fired.
OMG It happened!
/me dies
Finally someone compared a desktop (not pro, I know some ati pro level cards as matrox ones) Gfx card, optimized for gaming... With... SGI...
Yes, folks this is history.
I think you're underestimating ATI's and nVidia's latest generations. If you go and read this technical document (PDF, ~4 MB) on the nVidia GeForce FX, you'll see that it does, in fact, support full 128-bit floating point all the way up to, and including, the frame buffer. I'm not certain why 12 bits of integer should be better than 32 bits of floating point, per component, maybe you could educate me a bit there? Also, I don't know what the actual analog output quality of the FX chipset is, maybe SGI has a (small) lead there, still.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
just two??? where the hell have you been?
typical headline reads:
Noun Verb Noun
aka subject and predicate
i.e.:
IBM announces some spiffy thing
Alan Cox washes his nuts
SO, the whole soviet russia thing, wherever the hell it came from, goes like this. they exchange the first noun with "you", flop the nouns around, and prepend the headline with "in soviet russia".
so, here we go:
SGI launches R16000
- In Soviet Russia, R16000 launches you!!!!
cant believe i wrote this post.
In Soviet Russia, Beowulf Cluster imagines you!
webb YOU!! Morgan launches
How about the slashdot reader who IS employed, and is reading and moderating on a day off from work?
Way to cover all the bases.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
It's not the run-single-task-as-fast-as-possible. Intel/AMD rule that part, with Intel up a slight lead.
It's not the very parallell computing, like movie rendering. Clusters, usually Linux clusters do much better compared to cost.
It's not most kinds of servers, that are usually IO bound and it's the disks, controller, NIC and mobo (backplane) that make the server. Few of those need more than dual MP cpus to do well.
I know roughly where the SGIs still shine. But how many really have those specific needs? Not many that I can think of.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Once upon a time SGI realized it bought lots and lots of MIPS cpus... so SGI bought MIPS.
As time went on, SGI noticed that the MIPS market was fragmenting... high end R1x000 series CPUs for workstations and supercomputers and low end embedded cpus for the consumer market. So SGI spun off MIPS, Inc but kept the R1x000 for itself.
These days MIPS Inc has nothing to do with SGI. And SGI's R16000 etc have nothing to do with MIPS Inc. I believe NEC fabs the R1x000 series for SGI.
A far as "true 64 bit" in the R4000, which version of IRIX ran on R4k with 64 bit pointers ? 6.2 and 6.5 certainly don't on my IP22.
64-bit support was first supported with IRIX 6.0 running atop R4000 and up.
However, certain platforms do not support 64-bit pointers. IP12/IP20 (Indigo) IP22 (Indy/Indigo2), and IP32 (O2) are among those that don't. This is due to memory contraints and other assorted issues.
Most, if not all, Onyx and Challenge (L and XL only) machines support 64-bit pointers with IRIX 6.0 and up.
Onyx2, Origin, Octane, and Fuel certainly do.
Getting back to the article, I'm glad to see SGI coming out with a new CPU. I still see a few SGIs in the wild now and again. If they lock down Irix a bit more security wise and expand their target market, they might be a decent competitor for Sun within the next 10 years.
Hear Hear. I'm also happy to see SGI pushing some new kit. It sounds like they've been quite busy lately. Rumor has it there are even some revolutionary (not simply evolutionary) MIPS cpu changes due soon.
IRIX security isn't too bad, it's certainly way better than it was just a couple years ago. If you dig around the software section of their website you'll see that they've even been working with the IPFilter author on some pretty serious IRIX packet filtering.
A lot of us out in academia/research hope SGI decides to drop their per-cpu price soon. Their individual CPU performance is still pretty decent but certainly not cutting edge. It's their I/O and thruput that's amazing... and we'd like to make better use of that. Shucks, the IRIX kernel can easily support 512 CPUs in a single machine (1024 if you use the IRIX XXL kernel). It's been tweaked every which way. But as it stands, we can't afford more than a 64 CPU machine. Still pretty nice, though. Even when working on a 6-CPU job, our (already somewhat old) Origin 3000 stomps all over our Myrinet-based cluster for anything that uses a significant amount of I/O. When shared memory is involved, the differences are even greater! (To compare, the newest Myrinet interconnect is 4 gbit/sec full duplex... SGI's NUMAlink3 is 25.6 gbit/sec [3.2 gbyte/sec]).
I'm looking forward to working with the new MIPSpro compilers too. Our SGI sales rep is supposedly going to bring the newest version and some demo licenses soon.
Out of sheer boredom, I blew about $80 on an SGI from eBay.
Pretty old machine. 133MHz, 64MB, dual 2GB SCSI drives.
IRIX is pretty neat. It had some pretty decent 3D hardware. The installed Demos were equal to about a 400MHz Pentium II with a graphics card that didn't come out until 1998. No idea what year this SGI came out. early 90's?
I've also used O2's at some customers sites, and they're about as fast as the fastest wintel desktop you can get right now, at least in the CAD programs and such that they use. They tell us the Windows boxes can't handle the file sizes and datasets they use, and a lot of the software isn't even availble under 2K/NT.
believe it or not people will not buy a console until they can copy games [or have someone do it for them].
This is not because people are inherently criminal [although the something for nothing element can't be denied] but because for most casual gamers £40 for a game they may only play once is just too much.
Here we have a folder with literally hundreds of copied ps2/xbox titles. 99% of them don't get played for more than a couple of hours on the day they got downloaded. [the pile of non-pirate games is larger than most people's collection too]
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I'm confused. I thought MIPS was supporting droppings on Itanium. And why are they releasing new IRIXes when there is Linux?
Sun's UltraSPARC III Cu tops out at 1.05Ghz last I checked. Does that mean that the P4 at 3Ghz stomps the hell out of it? If you said yes, you are a fucking idiot.
:-{
Then you have never experienced a UltraSPARC III Cu side by side with a decent x86 system. While it has a huge amount of cache, it is SLOW SLOW SLOW. Matlab (with float heavy code) is at worst 50% faster on a lowly 1.67GHz (MP2000) Athlon compared to the 900MHz USparc III. It gets smoked in integer performance, but does better clock for clock in FPU usage. Alas, overall, it is about 40-50% "better" on a MHz basis. In my experience, the 3GHz PIV (Xeon, mind you) stomps HARD on the USparc. It's embarrasing.
The 1.0GHz is about on par with a 2GHz PIV. And that's the uber-blest 8MB of L2 cache version. Cheaper ones don't fair so well. High memory bandwidth on Athlon MP and PIV Xeon systems help make up for cache shortcomings.
I like the SPARC instruction set and the impressive FPU speed attainable on low GHz cores, but it is entirely too expensive and it doesn't pack enough oomph for smaller (4-way) servers and workstations. The same can be said for the various iterations of the R10000 series in workstation environments (too keep from going entirely offtopic here).
And in bigger configurations, IBM's Power4 architecture makes it look like a toy too.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Isn't it MIPS that make the CPUs?
(This is not sarcasm, I really wanna know.)
4MB L2 cache => *huge* die => low yield => huge cost. Yeap, it's that simple.
The Raven
Looks like SGI is a Poindexter and TIA/Bush whore.
This is from their website concerning their "Information Dominance Solution" (Jesus that sounds fucking creepy).
"Today, governments worldwide are inundated with an abundance of data but a shortage of information that supports the decision-making process. In the future, a variety of sources and sensors will continue to generate ever-increasing amounts of such data. That data includes text-based information and records along with more complex media types such as video, audio, imagery, scans, electronic emissions, and other geo-referenced data."
Translation: Governments are finding it harder and harder to spy on their citizens.
"SGI has developed a variety of visualization and computing technologies ideally suited to allow government decision makers to rapidly assimilate the growing amounts and diverse types of data being collected. Finding the few important bits of information out of mountains of data is the job of the SGI Decision Support Center (DSC) solution, which uses large-scale visualization, high-performance computing, and the management of complex data to provide mission-critical information to support rapid and confident decision-making cycles. "
Translation: SGI wants to help.
SGI: 48 bits
Or to put it this way, if we use the alpha channel as well, the PC has 4294967296 possible colours, the SGI has 281474976710656 possible colours.. (since WinDOS (and AFAIK Loonix/XF86) won't support more than 32 bits for colour).
Clear enough yet?
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
"700MHz, has 4MB cache"
:-P
Hey, according to intel, this processor, at 700MHz, is about 4 years old, and has no hope of competing with intel's True MHz processors!
Many factors limit the performance of systems. One thing if I remember correctly that makes SGi machines so fast is that components talk to each other directly and at full speed. They have a fancy name for it, like interweave connect or something like that. So who cares how fast your processor is when you are using legacy designs for components that can't keep up with your processors cycles. Also the IA64 is solid, but there are a lot of better choices out there. Mainly becausse MS and Intel are pushing hard to move into that high tech market. I personally feel that AMD is going to corner the market early with their x86-64 processors and linux as their prefered OS. Plus SGi still alive because of the high tech industry, which is a small portion of the market, but a great deal of the money, ie people paying millions for a 500+ processor super computer, or $60,000+ high end servers. They are dead in the graphics industry, 1st because of no Photoshop 4 for IRIX (due to adobes poor coding and MS) and finally linux taking away the 3D market. They are probably going to get bought out by one of the larger High Tech CORPs like IBM, NEC or Terracomputing...
But who can resist a curvy indigo case? These are every /.ers dream date! A supermodel and an SGI? You know which one youd pick..
It's 11 bits for blue, 11 bits for green, and 10 bits for red. People don't like red as much as the other colors.
With Linux in SGI's new IA-64 servers. Not officially released yet I don't think, but they had a "this isn't really here" demo at a computer show recently... was a slashdot article about it here somehwere. (ACs don't use search)
Translation: The government is finding it harder and harder to spy on terrorists. Remember that whole september 11 thing? I big part of why it was missed was that the intelligence agencies had a 2+ day lag time on processing most data, and a LOT of data just never gets processed at all. The government isn't anywhere close to having time to spy on it's own citizens - it can't even keep track of foreign exchange students.
SGI is trying to stop terrorists from flying planes into your office building.
The obligatory:
4.???
5.Profit!
Sorry, I had to...
* 700 MHz
* Four-way superscalar, 64-bit architecture
* Out-of-order instruction execution
* Five separate execution units
* MIPS 4 instruction set
* 32KB two-way set-associative on-chip instruction cache
* 4MB fast secondary cache
Key Architecture Features
* 3.2GB/sec main memory peak bandwidth
* 1.6GB/sec system-to-graphics interconnect
* VPro graphics
* MIPS RISC processing, 64K primary cache, 4MB secondary cache
* Optimized 200 MHz front-side bus
* 32- or 64-bit binaries
* Priority I/O
* Integrated PCI
You video guys are as bad as the "audiophiles" when it comes to the elitist crap.
"What? Only 32-bit colour output? pfft, I NEED at least 48!" Despite the fact that the human eye can only distinguish around 10 million different colours.
But it's okay! People like you fall right into marketing's hands. Hook...Line... and sinker. Go ahead, pay 10x the price for 0.01% increase in quality. Perhaps I'll get into that market and milk people like you for all they're worth.
No, it's not. 32-bit color is 8 bits each for the red, green, blue, and alpha channels. I think you're confusing it with 16-bit color, which is 5 bits for red and blue and 6 bits for green, IIRC.
If you want precision, you probably don't want to do floating point math, since IIRC floating point math is intrinsically inaccurate in the last couple of significant figures. With integer math, you might get some roundoff error in division, but addition, subtraction, and multiplication are all 100% accurate.
name me one company which will turn down the gov't when they come knocking with a multi-million dollar contract. Especially a company that's on the ropes.
Yeah, it sucks, but blame the gov't, not the companies that make the tools which can be used for good -or- ill.
SGI machines do plenty of good work, medical imaging comes to mind...
The output framebuffer colorspace is _NOT_ what matters, 32-bits is plenty. The problem that you run into with 32-bit precision math is that you get rounding errors that affect the quality of the output when layered calculations are being done in the graphics pipeline. Every transparency, pixel shader, and lighting effect you apply to the same 32-bit number, the more lossy it becomes. The 128-bit colorspace alleviates this problem, because the rounding errors are made so much more minute.
<Amanda`> I just went out to the parking lot in my bathrobe to exchange warez CDs.
For that matter, 24-bit color (the 16.7 million human distinguishable colors to which you are referring) is useless since most displays can't resolve that many colors. There are applications, like medical imaging or remote sensing, where you might need the precision of all those bits, even though your eye can't distinguish between the colors they represent, and these professional applications are SGI's target market.
with calligraphic lights you hit the screen with an extra, independent electron beam. This produces intense light points. These light points are useful in flight simulations, and I believe, required for some levels of certification of a sim.
Clusters are popular because usually you have to jusitfy the cost for purchasing the computers, but not the energy it uses, and you put it in a room that's there anyway.
A big adavantage of clusters is their inherent fault tolerance: a cluster can keep on working if one of the clustered machines spontaneously combusts. With a proprietary supercomputer, you usually have to wait for a service droid to arrive with the needed parts.
As for the cost of energy consumed, as long as you're talking about fully indistrialized countries that's going to be negligable compared to the costs of personnel and space.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
????, Profits
Actually, they have a few 1024 CPU's out there. I'd like to see such a linux cluster working as a single image.
:)
Don't get me wrong, I work with both technologies and some systems are better at some tasks while others are better at other tasks.
My philosophy is why use a F1 in downtown when you can use a scooter instead? (and you can probably carry more stuff on a scooter anyway).
Yeah, SGI is pricey, yes it doesn't apply to anything. But so what? I run applications that require some of the SGI "way of thinking" while other applications work fine on a cluster.
Let's not forget that some people don't mind about money and SGI will give them peak performance for their money
One thing most people don't seem to know is that you don't go out to sgi.com or hp.com and buy a $5M super computer. Your application is usually benchmarked and you buy from the vendor which gives you the best data. Then the contract certifies the benchmark. If you're not happy, they have to take the machine back...
That was my rant of the day
-- Leeeter than leet
Let's not forget that every machine has it's limitations. Otherwise, everybody would be using the same machine right?
You have to see the machine as a whole, not only the CPU.
Sure, a F1's engine is fast, but can you let it run 24/24 365/365? Probably not. How come we're not all driving the same car? Why do we have SUV's, car's, scooters, trucks? It's for the same reason. Each machine has an "edge" in a certain way...
-- Leeeter than leet
The only thing your pathetic 500MHz alpha will be a 2GHz P4 in is running hand-compiled Alpha code. Even then, I wouldn't be so sure.
You are very stupid or very naive. What you claim simply isn't true.
PC: 32 bits
:)
SGI: 48 bits
Not with the latest hardware. As the post you replied to mentioned, the Radeon 9700, as well as Nvidia's upcoming chip, support render targets and internal data paths with 32 bits of PER CHANNEL for a total of 128 bits of color data per pixel. SGI's hardware supports 12 bits of precision per channel for a total of 48 bits.
In fairness, those are 32-bit floats, not integers. The actual precision of the color data is "only" 24 bits per channel, and the remaining bits are taken up by the sign bit and the 8-bit exponent which allows a much greater range of magnitudes than if this was just a 32-bit integer.
Clear?
(And before anyone points out that 24 + 1 + 8 = 33, the top bit of the mantissa isn't stored because it's always implied to be a 1.)
Maybe so, but much of the graphics technology we take for granted was pioneered by SGI. Their engineers and technology built 3DFX and Nvidia and revolutionized the PC industry. Silicon Graphics can still easily build systems to run circles around PCs for real-time graphics. Their buses, memory and design are usually far more efficient. We'll forget they ever made the O2, for now. But they could never compete with the PC price/performance ratio. Cheap PCs have mass bandwidth, but are really inefficient, buggy and hard to scale (GB+ clusters and the right software might strongarm even this obstacle). Although I bet it is extremely difficult to outclass SGI's supercomputers. Perhaps IBM or NEC have a chance, but any cluster of PCs would be laughed at today.
The primary motivation for more color bits isn't the final output. Many monitors don't even have 8 bits per channel in their color resolution! But when you're performing many layers of compositing and texturing, if your intermediate results and your mathematical precision have an error of 1 part in 512 (the best you can hope for with perfect rounding and 8 bits per channel), the accumulated error in your final pixel can be very visible.
Furthermore, going to higher color precision makes it practical to have a linear color space. Your eyes are much more sensitive to subtle changes in dark colors than light ones, and the color distribution on most monitors is skewed accordingly (i.e. the difference in intensity between a green level of 13 and 14 is much smaller than between a green level of 240 and 241). That eliminates visible banding in dark areas, but it makes it a bitch to add things together and have it come out right (i.e. an color value of 40 isn't twice as bright on screen as a color value of 20). With insanely high precision, you can just use a linear color space and still have enough precision at the low end to avoid banding.
> for 99.999% (that's 5 nines) PCs can do the job
> and even do it better and especially do it much
> cheaper.
I don't buy it. With ix86 PCs, it's not just the software that's crap compared to legitimate enterprise solutions, but the hardware too. Linux is nifty and all, but it only improves the software side. The hardware is still shit.
I've used ix86 boxes from most every builder... from solidly well-built IBM machines, to crap boxes built by dell from commodity parts. Not a one of them has achieved five nines. Remember, that's only five and a quarter minutes of downtime PER YEAR. With most OSs, if you reboot two or three times, that eats up all of your downtime right there, assuming NO other problems.
ix86 boxes just are NOT up to the "five nines" standard. OTOH, I've seen more than a few Sparc, SGI, and RS6000s that can do it.
Remember... just because you CAN do something on the cheap with crap hardware doesent mean that you should. And it doesn't mean that enterprise hardware doesn't have its place.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
Why the fuck am I trolled? This is an honest question! The alpha used to run at 333 Mhz when Pentiums were 100 Mhz, regardless of the actual performance advantages. I remember in my computer organization class (I'm a computer science major) said that RISC chips can run at a higher clock since they don't have a microcode decode step and there aren't so many ridiculous multi-cycle instructions (like PUSH/POP all registers, String processing intstructions, etc). Are all the moderators a bunch of Mac fanatics?
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Thank you. I was not being clear enough, it seems.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Used to design SGI based systems in 1997 of so.
We used graphicless origin 2000s.
All our workstations were wintel using humingbird eXceed to run our graphics on the SGI.
And we loved them.
Why?
It's the I/O silly. Too date I don't see anything in the intel world that is keeping up with SGI's multi gigabyte packetswitched IO.
That's 1996/7 technology kicking intels 2002 but.
Why oh why hasn't SGI capitized on these strengths????
This is not a nintendo. Why waste cycles rendering nice boxes?
Besides, if you want to waste money on your investment, go ahead and download either KDE or Gnome on their freeware page.
-- Leeeter than leet
AFAIK, MIPS processors run on pretty low wattage compared to Intels. For example, SGI has 128 MIPS CPUS in a single rack while on the Intel side, it can only offer 16 due to heat factor. Those Itaniums are just getting too hot..
Don't forget about your A/C ratio as well... on in the end, it cost more to run Intel stuff..
-- Leeeter than leet
Latest ATI and nVidia cards support 128-bit color
throughout the entire piple line, which use 32-bit
float for each component of RGBA. SGI only supports 12-bit integer for each component. The
output precision from ATI/nVidia card is 10-bit
for each RGB component, which is more than regular display can support. (NOTE: it does not
make sense to include alpha/z-buffer in final output.)
Moving forward, SGI will lag behind further on
graphics war except very large graphics project,
such as Jurassic Park.
well, during my time coding gfx effects, from my dos days with vesa modes(2.0 vbe was sweet)...
i have never enountered such mode in actual use.
the 8 bits got wasted in every mode available on any card(that had any sense to use)..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The accuracy is neccessary for complex lighting, transparency effects and so on, 8-bit alpha sucks. The output is 10-bits per component.
s .h tml
http://www.sgi.com/workstations/octane2/graphic
Some facts missing from this discussion:
1. MIPS is a wholly owned subsidiary of SGI. This happened a few years back.
2. Strangely enough, MIPS is not the only company making MIPS processors (witness the PMC/Sierra RM7000A and others). MIPS is still a profitable company on their own due mostly to the ubitquity of their CPUs in embedded devices (they still sell a great deal of them for things like refridgeration controllers and bomb guidance "brains").
3. IRIX 6.5 is only as insecure as you are stupid. If you choose to run it in an "out of box" configuration then you are an idiot. You'd be an idiot to do that with many other Unix OS's as well. It's not a hard concept to grasp. Just apply your latest patches, turn off all the services you don't need and use ipfilterd for the rest (IRIX's not Darren Reed's which doesn't work under 6.5.x). You can also do things like turn on RFC1948 ISN support in your TCP stack.
4. What is the point of blathering on about the N64 versus the Playstation? They both used MIPS CPU's. Also, whoever said the PS2 uses MIPS needs to go look at the console specs again. It uses a custom set of ASICs and the "core" CPU (the "Emotion Engine") is NOT of MIPS make. It's a very unique hybrid. Check out this link for more info: Ars Technica - emotion engine
5. Your gawdy Las Vegas style PeeCee might kick my Indy's butt in terms of performance, but my Indy has a 100% Stainless steel case with a brushed finish. No blinky lights, no loud obnoxious jet-engine fans, no pink and blue Chinese pieces of plastic hanging off, and no brightly colored wires glaring through some plexiglass window illuminated by eye-murdering UV cold-cathode lights. See, I view all that PeeCee "modding" crap as the same garbage that pimps try to throw on their Brougham to try and front some style. The thing is, quality never goes out of style; to a C-coding gentleman, there is no substitute for some real class.
I'm one of those sentimental fools from the old school. I still write most of my code on "slow" old machines (because even though you might have a 3Ghz machine, you are still a punk ass fake if you can't code in C - sorry if the truth hurts). I stopped caring what happened to SGI after they made NT machines, ditched the cube logo, and hired a CEO who was a M$ spy-drone (Belluzo). However, I'll always respect their years of old (mainly the Indy & Indigo days). All that is gold does not glitter, and deep roots are not reached from the frost.
aliver
Right, except that you're still oversimplifying.
First, five 9s does not make the mistakes that three 9s makes.
Second, five 9s recovers smoothly from the mistakes that three 9s makes.
Third, five 9s does not let errors go by unnoticed like three 9s does.
Fourth, five 9s has a much more critical sense of what constitutes an error.
Fifth, when something does break, it has to be fixed. That counts.
Misquote from Dijkstra: "A baby crawling and a jet plane from JFK to LAX are both means of transportation".
Probably stays up 100%. That's what? About -1 or -2 9s, methinks.
Your post here got me to thinking. I had wanted and Indy back in the early 90's when I was working with Indigo's at a NASA contractor in Hampton, VA. Did not have the $$ tho. Now seems a good time!
...for $400.
After doing some digging, several things became clear:
- For a little more $$ than you'd need to spend for a used Indy (maybe $150 more on eBay), you can get a used O2 or Octane which are both much more powerful and viable today.
- The Octane is notably more powerful than the O2, but the market is flooded with them so the Octane is oddly cheaper than the O2. It's also much louder and larger than the O2--less of a "personal workstation" (see O2 and Octane photo here -- O2 on left)
So I have just grabbed an O2 with:
- R10000 CPU @ 175MHz, 1MB L2 cache
- 256MB RAM (unified memory architecture)
- 4GB HD
- A/V module (audio & video in & out)
- O2 cam
- keyboard / mouse
So I shall add to the list my first IRIX machine. Hope my OS X box does not get jealous...
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #8: LAIDBACK
This language was developed at the Marin County Center for T'ai Chi,
Mellowness and Computer Programming (now defunct), as an alternative to
the more intense atmosphere in nearby Silicon Valley.
The center was ideal for programmers who liked to soak in hot tubs while
they worked. Unfortunately few programmers could survive there because the
center outlawed Pizza and Coca-Cola in favor of Tofu and Perrier.
Many mourn the demise of LAIDBACK because of its reputation as a gentle and
non-threatening language since all error messages are in lower case. For
example, LAIDBACK responded to syntax errors with the message:
"i hate to bother you, but i just can't relate to that. can
you find the time to try it again?"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...