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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.
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.
I thought enough material had finally invaded the net for people to realize Mhz means nothing... I guess I was wrong.
Let's play what if... cause I don't have any facts on this processor: What if the mov operation of said processor is 1 cycle, whereas mov of pentium is 7?...
Where does that put you?
Books are written on CPUs. pick one up, and you'll understand Mhz means nothing.
processor performance has never been SGI's strong point, except for breifly after the R3000 and R10000 were introduced.
SGI's workstation line is largely unimpressive, especially for the 99% case of computer users, hell, even engineers.
The problem is, for a small set of jobs, for a small set of people, nothing else is suficient - at any price. You're either using an SGI, or the work isn't taking place.
That market is continuing to erode, but i dont think it will ever dissolve completely. I think eventually SGi will effectively become a US govt subsidized entity. SGI continues to build the systems that only governments need and only government agencies can afford.
Clustering has nothing to do with the markets SGI sells in. Please don't mention it, it makes me think you don't know what you're talking about.
Do you ?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I'll be running my P4 at 3 Gigahertz, thankyouverymuch.
;)
True, but your architecture still sux
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Uh, can I have that in libraries of congress, please? (Or at least cubic foot of server space / "per 1U rackspace").
The Playstation also used a R3000A MIPS processor. You really don't know what you're talking about.
I guess that makes it faster than my car. :)
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
There's also a thing called efficiëncy. At my job we make use of a lot of Alpha's ranging from 500 to 700 MHz. Those speeds look outdated if you're used to intel, but the workload these babies pull is impressive...
Sigh...
Come on people. You all root for the Athlon when it is clocked well under the P4, yet you believe that SGI's MIPS line is crap when it tops out at 700Mhz???
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.
People, the Unix world is far far different from what you are used to in PC land. High speed backplanes, dedicated busses, huge amount of L1 cache, insane L2 cache, incredibly efficient cpu designs (where 1 clock per instruction is pretty much the norm and cache misses don't occur every 3 operations), hot swap damn-near-everything, upwards of 72 processors and 288 GB of RAM...
It all adds up to a fucking badass machine that smacks the piss out of any PC on the planet when it comes to getting its job done. Don't compare apples to oranges. The applications these machines are designed for do not include Quake 3. The benchmarks you have memorized don't mean a damn thing in this realm, so go back home.
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. I don't see them winning any shining star awards right off the bat, but if they are persistant they'll do alright in the long run.
You really cannot compare a 700Mhz MIPS chip to a 3000Mhz x86 p4.
You must remember, the R16000 is 64-bit, not 32-bit.
Also, it has 4000k of L2 cache, not 256k or 512k.
Also, out-of-order instruction execution, x86 chips can't do this.
you are trying to compare two things that are completely different.
Alcohol & calculus don't mix. Never drink & derive.
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?"
Wha?
You, sir, are almost completely uninformed. The R16000 is an R10000 variant, just like the R12000 and R14000 before it. It is not a vector processor, and has no vector units. The R16000 is, furthermore, a desktop processor in its own right, because it's currently being used in the Fuel workstation.
Incidentally, SGI divested itself of Cray some time ago. Cray was bought by a company called Tera Computing, which then changed its name to Cray. They're building the SV2 vector supercomputer now, using their own processors, and they also have an arrangement with NEC to market the SX-6 in the United States with a Cray logo, but that's strictly a resale agreement.
I write in my journal
SGI workstations run at what? $5000 and up?
$10,000 and up, but who's counting?
I write in my journal
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.
You must remember, the R16000 is 64-bit, not 32-bit.
For the record, the R10000 series can run either 32-bit or 64-bit code. All other things being equal, the 32-bit version of a program will run faster than the 64-bit version; you can fit more 32-bit ints into cache at once than 64-bit ints, so the 64-bit version of a program generally suffers more cache misses than its 32-bit counterpart.
On an SGI box, you don't compile for 64-bit unless you absolutely have to address more than 2 GB of virtual memory.
Also, it has 4000k of L2 cache, not 256k or 512k.
That's pretty puny for an SGI. The processors they use in the Origin servers have typically been equipped with 8 MB of secondary cache; the 4 MB version must be just for the workstations, to keep costs manageable.
you are trying to compare two things that are completely different.
On this point, however, you're 100% correct.
I write in my journal
I'm sorry to disapoint you.. but I have no problem agreing with you that the clock speed is not all... But its still important... On our CFD (Computation Flow Dynamics) the kind of thing that SGI super-computers are made to handle.. Our el-cheapo AMD Athlon based cluster kicks the ass of pretty much every SGI in the data-center where it is.. and I think it even kicks the ass of the NEC... So yes, I'm sorry but 3Ghz is more than 4 times 0.7ghz and it does heck a difference.. And if you look at operation per dollar, there is not even a comparison... And I wont tell you how much their OS sucks.. the latest Irix versions feels like linux for 8 years ago (I mean the userspace stuff, I dont know much about their kernel...)..
Nice troll, and if it isn't, wow. Everything in your post is false. the 700Mhz MIPS certainly does stand a chance against other processors and I would love to have one, but as for price/performance, it is probably a very poor option.
The N64 did well as a system, and had far more power than the playstation. The playstation just did incredibly well.
Hollywood is a city, not a company. I am assuming you are talking about 3D and compositing visual effects studios, of which a few are near Hollywood, California. They aren't going to BSD, they are going to Linux, not just for rendering, but for workstations. Irix is unix and it makes it a very flexible choice for an OS. Because Linux is so similiar, it is also a flexible and powerful.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
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
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.
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);}
i dont need a MIPS history lesson. I didn't "forget" any of those CPUs. The R8000 was almost non-existant across SGI's product line.
While it was the first implementation of MIPS4, and it was an FP monster, and had a huge TLB for the time, it really wasn't so hot as a general purpose CPU.
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.
When the R3k came out it was the first real example of commercially FAST and successful RISC design. It was used in multiple machines from multiple companies. SGI didn't "really" up the ante again until R10k, which was their first offering that was superpipelined and superscalar.
Finally, regarding SGI and clustering:
SGI is not price-competitive with shared-nothing clusters of PCs or Alphas. Nor is it trying to be. You probably know what the O2k/O3k systems are good at and how they differ from any other system being sold today, othewise you wouldn't have responded to me. I think my statement is valid --- the SGI big iron solves problems that shared nothing clusters CANT. Furthermore, they're so much more expensive than shared nothings that if you need shared nothing and buy origin, you're silly.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
"Also, out-of-order instruction execution, x86 chips can't do this."
Bull.
x86 has done this since the introduction of the Pentium Pro.
You mean Apple ads?
Seriously, what 'material' are you talking about? I know about SPEC, according to which the currently fastest CPU is the Itanium 2 1000 MHz, followed closely by the PIV 3.06 GHz. From that I would deduce that even if you've got a relatively slow CPU (in terms of computations per clock cycle), if you manage to run it at very high frequencies, you'll still have one of the fastest CPUs out there.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
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.
erm. Slight update on the Cray thing.
They also sell the MTA, a hardware threaded architecture - from the Tera days - and the SV2 is now called the X1. They are also doing an AMD Opteron derived one-off system for Sandia National Laboratories. Though, from what I am hearing, it might not be a one-off system - they're considering productizing it.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Two way systems are not data center solutions that IBM, Sun, and SGI are competing for with this kind of hardware.
Even if they were, you're ignoring the fact that you cannot physically pack as many CPUs with Intel or AMD as with MIPS, Power4, or Sparc into a chassis. Part of the reason they are clocked slower is because you need to balance heat management with performance density when you're dealing with the big servers.
These boxes are about aggregate compute and storage power per dollar, not about whether the individual CPU cores smoke. The only place you see these cores as singletons is workstations (Single-cored "servers" are usually just the same or similar motherboards as a workstation, but in a case that has a beefier power supply and room for a useful number of hot-swap cages.)
You try and pack 32 Intel cores at 3GHz into a chassis that will handle the same number of MIPS cores, and the only thing you're going to get is voltage underflow from an overloaded power supply. Beef up the power supply, and within minutes you're going to be getting that wonderful whiff of frying, overheated electronics.
Raw performance of a core is only one factor in engineering a complete server. Anyone who claims otherwise has clearly not been involved with the hardware end of this industry.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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
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
"...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!
OK, what is the deal with "In Soviet Russia XXX launch YYY".
I've seen two jokes with Soviet Russia now. And I'm not laughing. Can someone let me in on the inside joke here?
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
How about we bring in the {mips|flops|whatever) per watt, then we start to get even better. The USIII runs off what, around 25-30W, the p4 draws around 70W. Using this, we have the Sun box beating the P4 quite easily, as we can scale up the number of processors to a higher number before we have problems due to dissipating heat and drawing soo much power that we blow the breakers in the data center.
As you can guess from the above post, I don't like the x86 architecture, ugly_hack(){ ugly_hack(); }. There's something to be said about elegance in the design of a processor.
How about with memory throughput, I believe the cray C90 is still up around 4-5, and it's around 10 years old. What's the point of massive compute power if it has to sit idle most of the time waiting for memory access.
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.
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|
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.
Have you read the SPECint and SPECfp results posted above? The Pentium4 runs at 6 (six) times this cpu's speed, yet only scores twice. Talk about good cpu design.
You should also keep in mind that SGI has some ass kicking technology when it comes to cpu and memory interconnect. NUMAFlex makes it possible to have a penalty as little as 1.5 vs 1 for memory accesses outside the local ram banks. Now try doing that with commodity x86 hardware. For problems that aren't easily broken down in small parts and, that have huge datasets, nothing touches SGI.
Kudos to the SGI engineers for their great job.
A long time SGI fan :)
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.
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
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
"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!
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.
*sigh*
I thought enough material had finally invaded the net to realize sarcasm.
Note the original posters helpful use of an emoticon at the end of his post. Emoticons can symbolize many tones in situations where the text would otherwise be unclear.
Where does that put you?
" 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."
It lost to Windows, believe it or not. Lots of FX houses have sprung up in recent years running Lightwave on Wintel platforms. Are they as fast? Nope, but they're much cheaper. And that's what counts in the TV FX industry.
I'm not saying you're wrong though, just adding a little more info to what you said. Today Linux is getting wide-spread use all over the graphics world. Maya runs well on it and is the program of choice. Want to render faster? Throw on another render node.
I doubt SGI's even on the radar with 3D people anymore. If they want to cater to that market, what they'll have to do is create hardware that's really really really tuned to rendering and gets the job done much faster. I doubt they're really going that way though. If Nvidia keeps up with their support of the Cg programming language, we may find ourselves upgrading video cards instead of processors. That will be an interesting day.
Blades are clusters-in-a-box, not integrated SMP systems. Like clusters, they hide the fact that you're dealing with multiple boxen, and don't have the shared system image and devices of a large system chassis.
Assuming those are 2-CPU blades, you'd need 16 of them to equate a 32-core system chassis, and would still need to add RAID arrays to the rack (unless a virtual SAN will do for your application -- it won't for large database servers.)
Bottom line is you need to know what the system is going to be used for, and compare the features that support those needs. Even identically-cored systems based on SMP vs. cluster vs. blade are going to have radically different performance characteristics and benefits for different uses.
Blades are great for things like web server hosting, where you want a lot of isolated processes. Clusters are good when you need shared storage, but don't need shared memory. SMP chassis can handle all of the above, plus deal with the large IO caches and shared memory that database and application services require, but at a higher dollar/benchmark cost than the first two. (Not surprising -- SMP backplanes require far more complex engineering than clusters or blades of off-the-shelf SMP systems relying on GNet or other non-backplane interconnects.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
on 64bit archs, ints are STILL 32bits. only longs and pointers become 64bits.
Of course, you're right. I don't know what I was thinking. I mean to say "pointer" but typed "int" anyway. Oops.
I write in my journal
"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."
Are you kidding? The reason that the PS seemed 'smoother' than the N64 was that it had almost no graphic features turned on. Don't believe me? Fire up Ridge Racer and watch the road beneath you. Notice that it turns all zig-zaggey when it gets close enough to you? That was one of the limitations of the PS hardware. It wasn't doing anywhere close to the number of calculations per pixel that the N64 was doing.
The real reason that the PS appeared 'smoother' was that it used minimal graphics tricks and pumped around 300k triangles on the screen. The N64 had all the features turned on and was getting around 100k triangles. So the result was that the N64 had fewer triangles to work with, but much MUCH better texture quality.
As for being a nail in SGI's coffin, I agree with you, but not for the reason you suggest. The N64 was both quite powerful and quite popular. The PS may have done better, that doesn't mean that the N64 didn't do well. The SGI processor did just fine, but they pretty much designed themselves out of business. Why are they charging a premium for their hardware when they can get a slimmed down system crammed into $150 box? In reality, that may or may not have directly affected their credibility. But it did significantly lower the value of the effects they were able to accomplish. Suddenly, consumer hardware can do what SGI does. Hrmm Why do I want this expensive box again?
"PC's running bsd are still a far greater value than expensive sgi hardware."
No argument here. Though I believe SGIs have their place, I think your comment's right on the ball. SGI didn't isn't doing enough to wow customers. Let me give you an example, when they launched the Intel based NT Line, there was only one real major difference between that machine and any other PC on the market was that it had a much faster bus between the RAM and the graphic chip. The problem is, what do you do with that when everything's designed around a 1x AGP bus? (this was 2-3 years ago..)
My company has a particular application today (but not back when we had the machines) to get ludicrious amounts of data to the graphics processor, but that's a very specific need. Not something you can build a whole company around.
They should have done more than just having the fast graphic bus if they were going to cater to the Wintel crowd.
So yeah, I basically agree with what you said, but your details about the N64 were significantly wrong.
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.
Well, last time I checked CFD (especially FLUENT) was one of those borderline embarrassingly parallelizable applications that are ideal for the shared-nothing architecture of a cluster, therefore I would be surprised to hear that your SGI/NEC machines get their butts kicked by a cluster of Athlons.
SGI, with it's ccNUMA architecture excels at handling problems that need the performance boost of multiple processors but that require a single-system image because they are inherently only poorly-parallelizable. These are usually problems like 3D seismic modelling, crash test simulations for vehicle manufacturers and CAT scan visualization in medical computing. This is the sort of computing that would slag a cluster of Athlons into a puddle of glowing silicon if the Myrinet cables didn't melt first. Origins handle them with ease.
utter rubbish
utter rubbish
> 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...
CISC is even more of MHz increaser, because the decoding of the instruction gets chopped up into many parts too...
Interesting. An INDY? Any pics / specs?
You've got me considering doing the same again--every year or so I think of grabbing an old SGI. I used to lust after the INDY for home in the early 90's.
Would add it to the collection.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
Here I'd think sane people would think such horrific annhiliation of beowulf mentioners is funny.
I guess that makes moderators insane...
(or too lazy to understand the thread)
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
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.
Eugh, exceed.. the Xserver with "xhost +" by default and no obvious way to turn it off.. now how secure is that?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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