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SGI Announces MIPS and IRIX End of Production
ramakant writes "Considering the recent news regarding their dismal financial situation, it should come as no surprise that SGI announced end of production for MIPS based hardware and the IRIX operating system. From the article: "SGI launched the MIPS/IRIX family of products in 1988. Since then, this technology has powered servers, workstations, and visualization systems used extensively in Manufacturing, Media, Science, Government/Defense, and Energy. After nearly two decades of leading the world in innovation and versatility, the MIPS IRIX products will end their general availability on December 29, 2006." IRIX has always been my favored OS, and I'll be sad to see it gone. Hopefully my O2 will survive for many years to come."
Now what narrowly-deployed architecture for which everyone runs a CPU simulator will be taught in computer organization and assembly language classes?
204 items found for SGI.
Good times for collectors.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Irix itself wan't that much worse than any other *nix of the same time period, but none of the varied tools, 3D bells & whistles that SGI bolted on were designed with security in mind. The only way to avoid getting hacked into was to remove it all before connecting it to the net, but once you removed it there was little point in buying one.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
so hopefully those of us using Irix will see maintenance releases until then.
-jpeg
Now I have to dump my IRIX, right after I dumped SCO UX. This just isn't fair!
Microsoft: "You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips."
Alpha, MIPS, and others - where are you now? x86-2^x is pretty much all that's left for general-purpose programming these days (although Sun might have something to say about that), and that's too bad. Kind of like how you can't be a great programmer without ever having seen Lisp, you can't be a great chip designer without ever having known something that doesn't run IA32 code.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I learned on SPARC; I thought everybody else did too...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This just IRIXs me to no end.
IRIX is System V-based, and thus probably encumbered with SCO nastiness... I wouldn't expect it to be open sourced. Perhaps the parts that were developed by SGI could be, though. They already released XFS under the GPL, for instance.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I think they should release IRIX under the GPL and let the community maintain it!
Its sad to see SGI in the state it is...
It seems innovators, the "product guys", have a danger of being overrun by companies with more agressive marketing. The technology lovers, the hackers, don't always make it in a world run by economics.
MIPS is popular because it's unpatented (except for a few less common instructions, which aren't taught in Computer Organization and Design anyway). A common term project in computer architecture courses is to design a reduced implementation of the MIPS architecture on an FPGA; some students go beyond this and end up with Plasma. The ARM architecture, on the other hand, is still patented.
The most popular ARM platform simulator nowadays seems to be VisualBoyAdvance.
What would be awesome is if they made *all* the patches available after the EOP/EOL period. As of right now there are a lot of them that are restricted to folks with support contracts. Ideally they would make the core OS available as well instead of just the overlays, but I'm not going to hold my breath on that.
It'd be nice though.
I feel sorry for the person that picks an OS dependent on a corporation for its existence. When there is only one "Sun" to nourish your OS "ecology" it is much more likely to wither away - eventually. I picked an popular open source OS for this very reason. RedHat may die but it will take a unprecedented disaster to also kill off Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware (especially Slackware), SUSE Linux, etc.. My intellectual investment is safest with Linux.
Choose wisely,
Richard
I always remember talking to some vendor at a usenix conference a few years after the birth of IRIX. We were talking about the relative benefits of SunOS (Solaris as it is now) versus IRIX. The guy said that using IRIX compared to SunOS was like riding a motorbike compared to driving a car. "It's fast, it's a rush, it's more fun than you can possibly imagine - but it's easy to fall off - and when you do it hurts a lot more!"...that pretty much says it all.
I spent a large fraction of my most productive years sitting in front of a million dollar computer with IRIX in my face. It was pretty good - but with SGI's market share shrinking and Linux getting so mature, it makes sense for them to dump the hideous cost of maintaining an entire OS by themselves. For SGI, it's a good decision in desperate times.
We split from using SGI to off-the-shelf PC/Linux about 5 years ago - about as soon as nVidia's graphics got good enough for our needs. A PC costs about 1% of an SGI with similar horsepower...QED.
As for MIPS, the equation is the same one Apple had to face down. Performance = Horsepower per CPU / Price per CPU -- and whilst your own solution can win on horsepower, you can't beat the price of whatever is made in the largest quantities...and it's the same deal as with IRIX - when you have to cut costs, designing your own CPU isn't the smart way to go.
Sad - but inevitable.
www.sjbaker.org
Lex's skills are useless now. :(
So exactly what is left of SGI's product line now?
Hardly. Everyone knows it's all ball bearings nowadays!
Come on, it's one thing to admire it, but it's not like there's been much new happening in the Irix world for a while. I really admire Tru64, but I'm not about to call it my "favorite OS".
I suspect this is how Apple's computer branch will end, but of course it's just my opinion, not a prediction (or trying to flame).
In mid 199x, I remember buying a PC Magazine which had review of lots of cool things, among with was the latest SGI machine (I think it was SGI Octane 2, but not sure, maybe it was the first one). It had some cool 3D shots, granted, but Glide and OpenGL already had a firm ground and DirectX was just becoming popular as well.
I was just a kid, but back then I honestly looked at the price and though "wow, that's kinda nice but why would I buy this overpriced proprietary machinery versus a simple PC?". Most 3D pro-s still wanted their Octane though, because of its status symbol and the cool factor (yea and maybe because it was somewhat better than the PC technoogy at the time).
I think the same for Apple computers now. Especially with Vista on the horizon (yea you can tell me how stupid Aero is, and I would say: yea it is, but users won't see it this way), I truly wonder who would buy this overpriced proprietary machine versus a simple PC?
Apollo, DEC, Amdahl, Prime, RCA, Remington Rand, GE, Univac, Perkin Elmer, MassComp, Concurrent Computer, Compaq, Sequent, Encore, Xerox, Scientific Data Systems, Wang, GO corporation...and so many more.
The only lesson you could profit from in all this carnage is knowing when to sell your shares, when to find a good merger rather than waiting for the bankers to hold a fire sale of your patent portfolio.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
last release 6.5.30 was on august 16, 2006. See improvements and new features here
also of importance at the bottom of the article is:
SGI ported their graphics code to linux years ago, so that they could eliminate the cost of maintaining their own unix variant.
Even chkconfig reasonably standard in mainstream linux distros. IRIX is not worth the effort.
They can now concentrate on their core competency, which is presumably better graphics hardware than their competition.
I guess Erwin will have to start shopping for spare parts on ebay...
With a background on VAX/VMS and Alpha OSF/1, the thing that most impressed me about the Irix machines I used was the scalability of the NUMA systems, and the Guaranteed Rate IO stuff in Irix. I'm not sure how much of the latter is in the Linux version of XFS.
I'm sorry to see this stuff go.
Shaheed
And no, this isn't old news - a 500 MIPS CPU upgrade in Mar 2005 with a 3-year service contract.
j html?articleID=159903673
> http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.
>
> "Mar 21, 2005 04:00 PM
>
> More than 30 HP S88000 NonStop severs running HP OpenView enterprise-management
> software and containing more than 500 MIPS R16000 processors were recently
> installed at the Nasdaq data center, says Steve Randich,
> executive VP and CIO for Nasdaq.
> "
Why would you have to dump systems that are working?
In my network, we have about a dozen SGI machines of various makes still running. Many of them perform more reliably than the newer Dell machine's we've unfortunately purchased. One of the best features of SGI machines is that they have extremely long lifespans. We still have one mail server running NetBSD on an Indy. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were still running perfectly long after the Dells we got last week passed on. The same goes for our web servers running IRIX. They take some time to secure, but once they get going, well, they really don't stop.
We also have two SCO OpenServer systems from the early 1990s. The legal shenanigans of New "SCO" aside, they have proven to be some of the most reliable x86 systems we have.
We aren't going to retire what amounts to our best hardware, even if the vendors go crazy or otherwise stop supporting the products we're using. We think it'd be far riskier for us to go with new, untested solutions, especially when we have old ones that are rock-solid, and from the looks of things will contiue to work for many years to come.
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6301677114.html
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I do not quite understand why they didnt move into the x86/Linux server market, including the low end market, and perhaps, even desktops. This seems to be where the most demand is.
I wish they could at least open source the ultimate hacking file browser, as made famous in Jurassic Park.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
They could release Electrapaint as free software...
The current equivalent I have isn't quite the same - It moves differently.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
In fact, senior managers at Intel personally flew to Taiwan to "encourage" board makers to stay with Intel despite the significantly higher performance of MIPS. At the time, the MIPS R2000 was significantly faster than the Intel 80386. Intel management understood the problem and eventually whipped its slaves into producing the 80486.
So long, MIPS. Good riddance.
Hello, ARM! The ARM instruction set is open for anyone to implement. The patents that ARM holds apply only to the implementation but not to the instruction set itself. If you can figure out a way to implement the instructions in a way that differs from ARM's patented implementation, then you are free to do so.
ARM is quite unique. Both MIPS and SPARC resulted indirectly from millions of dollars of government funding at Stanford University and UC-Berkeley. By contrast, ARM was developed on a shoestring budget: its aim was to develop a successor to the 6502. We (yeah, that means you) loved the 6502 for its simplicity. ARM inherited that simplicity.
Further, the simplicity means incredibly low power consumption. If IBM had committed to ARM instead of building the PowerPC, ARM would eventually have shared the marketplace with the x86 in both the server market and the desktop market.
As Intel management has discovered, low power is the key. The traditional thinking has been that servers should suffer any amount of power usage for a higher clock frequency. However, once clock frequency is so high (i.e., exceeding 1 gigahertz) that power usage exceeds 100 watts, the power causes two serious problems: (1) high electricity bills and (2) degradation of server reliability (due to damage caused by heat to the other components in the system)
Of course, ARM has a built-in advantage due to its simplicity. Unfortunately, IBM engineers had a huge ego trip and demanded to build yet another RISC processor -- the PowerPC.
However, there is still time for ARM to succeed in the market for desktops and servers. NEC could commit to building ARM computers and pay Microsoft to port Windows Vista to ARM. NEC has the engineering might to compete against both IBM and Intel. With ARM, NEC has a winner!
You can run Irix binaries on NetBSD/sgimips. See http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2002/08/08/irix.ht ml for more information, and check out the NetBSD port's page at http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sgimips/.
I thought that Tivo uses the MIPS chip, is this going to affect Tivo in any way?
If you can figure out a way to implement LZW or RSA or MP3 or any other patented codec in a way that differs from the patent owner's patented implementation, then you are free to do so. Unfortunately, no other way exists because the claims on those methods are rawther broad.
PowerPC was also built to scale to multiple functional units per thread, such that they can run a load, an integer arithmetic, a floating point arithmetic, and a branch at once. Are any ARM implementations superscalar? XScale sure isn't. Or are you talking about a massively multicore CPU, some sort of squared octopus with 64 ARMs?
With ARM, NEC has a winner!
Combined with HED and LEG, it would be an even more powerful combination!
They should open source IRIX or sale it to someone.
This is a sad news.
...
:(
MIPS was a very well designed line of processors.
Alpha processors are dead, MIPS processors are dead, PowerPC are now only for gaming consoles,
Less and less choice, less and less competition, Intel domination
{{.sig}}
What do you have against x86?
The x86 has way better instruction set than MIPS. Look at all those instructions, each with varying side-effects depending on status bits. The x86 instruction set has so many classic and vital instructions, like AAA (Ascii Adjust Accumulator).
Thoroughly covering the x86 architecture covers so much of CPU history:
- 8-bit processors (8080A / 8085),
- 16-bit processors (8086),
- better 16-bit processors (80286),
- 32-bit implementations (80386),
- 16-bit addressing (8080 / 8085),
- segmented addressing (8088 - 80286),
- flat 32-bit addressing (80386),
- COBOL currency style instructions (AAA and DAA),
- FORTRAN floating point (FMUL), and
- C style instruction set optimizations (CMOV).
Covering the x86 instruction set reveals aspects of almost every historical computer language and programming language in existence! It takes students years to learn the architecture.
The MIPS architecture is comparatively clean, simple, and obvious. You can teach it in just one course, and cover so much less material. The x86 obviously has the superior instruction set. Besides, the x86 processors consume so much more power (watts and transistors) to do the same things as the MIPS architecture. Obviously, MIPS is just a bad design.
[sarcasm = off]
As we move to a single grey/bland architecture, and eventually OS, kicking and screaming.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That would be FSN (http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html ) which has an open-source clone on SourceForge.
FSV: http://fsv.sourceforge.net/
I still have an 8086 box that runs Microsoft Xenix (from before SCO existed). Xenix was a Microsoft product before MS-DOS existed. Yes, Microsoft was the first vendor of a licenced UNIX running on the x86 platform. My Altos 586 will support five users simultaneously logged in on terminals connected to it's five serial ports. It has 512K of RAM.
BSDs can't borrow from linux because of the restrictive and encumbering license the linux kernel is under. Linux can borrow from BSDs because the BSDs are truly free.
They'd consider opensourcing their IRIX stuff, so that anything not currently available under Linux could get ported.
You mean Electropaint... but anyway, good news for you, here's the source code, and it compiles on Windows:
http://users.volja.net/wesley/igl.html
"Panel Library and Electropaint sources are now a part of IGL distribution. David was really kind and allowed me to do this, so i hope everyone appreciates it as much as i do."
You'll need to get a compiler - plenty of free ones available. Builds just fine.
> Hopefully my O2 will survive for many years to come.
Yeah, maybe by then it will finish that integer add operation you submitted to it yesterday.
That's another hundred million or so mips based machines out there.
That or make a distribution of Windows CE tuned for laptop or desktop use.
....SGI does not do graphics anymore. SGI hasn't really done hardware graphics for 5+ years. And the last remnants of the software graphics team god laid off this year. It used to be that graphics for science (people willing to pay millions for a system) was hard. Now graphics for science is easy, and graphics for games is hard. Nobody is willing to pay big bucks for the improvements in graphics SGI could offer over nVidia/ATI.
SGI does HPC - lots of CPUs in a single system image with a shitload of memory throughput. And they have a great flexible computing FPGA implimentation. And great storage. So if you've got a shitload of data, either to process or move around, you want SGI.
Uhm well some parts of IRIX (OpenGL, FAM, CSA and _many_ others) are opensourced. SGI uses them on Linux/Itanium themselves. SGI licensed SysV code which they're (obviously) not allowed to open source. That has nothing to do with SCO. Ignore SCO, they're bullies who have not been proven right in anything afaicr.
Hey, can't developers just stick with POSIX compliant OS's and apps -- should run on Windows, and most of the *nix's, eh?
Just a correction: SCO owns the rights to the SysV code... so they have everything to do with not open-sourcing it. I'd love to ignore them, but they are the legitimate rights-holders of UNIX.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Wow! That's really, really, cool.
I think I will learn the gory details of X screen savers real soon.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
With SGI dropping MIPS and Apple dropping Motorola/IBM theres little diversity outside the Intel/AMD x86 world. Even Intel strangled itself introducing costly-to-develop non-x86 chips. Early custom super computing companies like CRAY, Convex etc have long since perished (The CRAY name still exists, ironically starved under its SGI ownership).
So if they are end of lifing it, how long after before it can be Open Sourced? I REALLY want inst for Linux, and hinv, and current XLVM and their C compiler and... and....
/etc/init.d? Thank IRIX. You like /etc/config? Thank IRIX. Like rpm via ftp? Thank IRIX (inst functionality still blows away RPM. apt/yum gets you much closer but it still doesn't beat it.
Ive been a Linux user since October of 1992. I was a season Solaris and HPUX admin before that. Ive been using IRIX since 1994 or 1995. It is BY FAR the easiest to administer OS. Do you like "chkconfig"? Thank IRIX. Do you like
I wonder if SGI is going to OSS the last MIPS distribution? Id love to update my O2 to the current version without having to buy a support contract. But I digress...
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
MIPS is alive and ticking. TiVo is still MIPS-based, right? More importantly, at LinuxWorld last month, a company called Movidis was demo'ing a cool 16-processor box in a 2U form factor that features no less than 8 gigs or RAM and 8 gigabit nics. From the white paper: OCTEON CN3860, a 16-core, 64-bit MIPS processor, executes nearly 20-billion instructions per second, using less than 50 watts of power... Each core is clocked around 500 to 600 mghz. So you can supposedly pipe 400 Mbytes/sec through this thing and it'll likely remain cool. I'm thinking this could be useful for store and forward packet manipulation. Linux 2.16 kernel comes with the thing so you actually have a chance of keeping it secure, unlike IRIX, details on the boxes at www.movidis.com. They're based in Santa Barbara. Now how can I come up with $5k to get one of these things to play with? Hey, if they'll spiff Slashdot a demo unit, I'll review it. ; )
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
What will SGI do? Make overpriced IA-32, X64 or IA-64 clones?