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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
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 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. :(
In 1993 SGI had the Indigo2, a powerful graphics workstation for the time, and a very, very well designed operating system. The Linux Kernel v1.0 wasn't even released until 1994. IRIX did and does scale incredibly well. Linux still doesn't, really.
It's a silly comparison to make, especially when SGI was dominant in its field. There would have been no question. If you'd said "Hey guys we should pick Linux over a company with 10 years of experience because in 15 years Linux will be half-decent!", you'd be cleaning out your desk.
Hardly. Everyone knows it's all ball bearings nowadays!
They've had Linux workstations for a while now, and have had Windows workstations as well.
I would imagine one or both will continue in production.
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".
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.
Time will tell which lasts longer. But I think the trend is clear.
-Richard
Hmm, you seem to have missed a feew things in the news lately....
I truly wonder who would buy this overpriced proprietary machine versus a simple PC?
1) not overpriced, a MacPro can be had for cheaper than a Dell
2) hadware has been more standardized. They've been pretty standard since they dropped NuBus. The OS is no more proprietary than Windows, hell you can even recompile the kernel.
3) Macs are PCs
last release 6.5.30 was on august 16, 2006. See improvements and new features here
This is UNIX! You're supposed to be able to take your ecology with you to Linux, or Solaris, or OpenBSD, or wherever. With some pain, admittedly---but little more pain than if you're migrating from, say, RedHat to Debian.
also of importance at the bottom of the article is:
oh, we should all be sorry for people who chose mvs or vm/cms in the last few decades? SunOS 1.0 was released in 1982, and today we have SunOS 5.10 aka Solaris 10. we'll have to see if there's Linux distros in 24 years before we can really pass judgements on longevity compared to Sun's stuff. BSD is still widely used too, and fifteen or more years older than GNU/Linux distros depending on how you look at things, so I'd say any BSD based stuff has even more safety than Linux (and Linux keeps borrowing good stuff from it and verse vice)
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...
You're really answering the fellow that was mourning IRIX. He seemed to feel the loss was more significant than merely a move between UNIX variants.
-Richard
See the thing is, your post is really a flame when it's born out of ignorance parading as fact.
This statement is the proof: "..overpriced proprietary machine versus a simple PC?"
1. What the hell are Dells, HPs, Compaqs, etc, if not overpriced proprietary machine? Put another way what is a simple pc?
2. Have you compared prices?
3. You failed to factor in the price of Vista and the cost of the required hardware necessary to run it.
Vista will not run on a simple PC.
The rumors of Apple's demise, that have been going since 1982, have been vasty over-rated.
1. BSD moved to open source. I think the open source energy has supported BSD well beyond Sun's involvement.
2. I do feel sorry for the VM/CMS folks. Does that world interest you?
3. EMACS is the dominant OS that outlasts them all. Emacs will be around until the sun collapses.
-Richard
I am an anonymous coward.. err.. don't really feel the need to create an account. But, as an SGI employee I can attest to Linux scaling very well on SGI. How about 1024 Itanium2 processors as a single system. No, this is not some cluster machine. One copy of linux runnuing on 1024p with many terabytes of memory.
Then there is a 4096 processor machine without manky infiniband interconnect or myrinet nonsense that you can run MPI programs against.
And if you really want a big cluster machine, how about 10240 processors addressable via MPI over infiniband.
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?
I remember helping PC Magazine out with the review of the Octane (not Octane 2) when I worked at SGI in 1997!
;-)
I took them through everything, and made sure that I took it apart, so they didn't feel like they needed to! (It was nicely built, but you had to be careful how you took it apart!).
I like to think that we got a really favourable review because of this. Of course, it didn't help SGI much!
Mark.
Don't forget apple energy supporting bsd. If someone runs linux on an ibm mainframe, that's happening under z/vm, which is part of the vm/cms family. Also, plenty of money and databases still running there, so yeah it's of interest to an integrator/migrator like myself.
With ARM, NEC has a winner!
Combined with HED and LEG, it would be an even more powerful combination!
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}}
Um, at least Solaris makes great efforts to make sure that an application that runs on Solaris.X will be able to be transfered seemlessly to Solaris.X+1. Thats one of the reasons there's all this legacy staff lying aroung in various directories. If you look at Solaris man pages, there's usually a note about whether the interface is stable and whether it will remain in the next releases. Even the output of commands tends to be relatively stable across releases. And of course there are cases of drivers (for example network cards) that are compatible across Solaris.8,9,10 because they were written according to the guidelines. Even the migration to 64 bits (on SPARC) has been done a decade ago. So, if you invest on it, chances are that your software will probably be able to be transfered unchanged to the next version, when it is around.
Linux is great, don't take me wrong, but in what way your intellectual investment is safe, when the entire landscape is in continuous flux? I mean, APIs are changing back and forth, kernel modules come and go across minor kernel releases, each distro has its favorite places where commands and files are placed. Not to mention the 32 to 64 bit migration which is in a terrible mess. This is not MHO, read July's Linux Journal editorial and laugh about it.
The truth is, I don't think you are not interested in any kind of intellectual investment, you are just betting on a horse because someone told you that in the end there can be only one. Well, guess what, "they" 've been saying the same since 1985, and today there is still Windows,Linux,all the BSDs,Solaris,AIX,HPUX etc etc. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon, and, really, it is great to have such a diverse ecology.
(Although I may have sounded harsh throughout the post, I want to stress that this is all just friendly advice -- kind regards)
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.
They'd consider opensourcing their IRIX stuff, so that anything not currently available under Linux could get ported.
The SGI-to-PC and Apple-to-PC comparison isn't very solid, though. While people endlessly nitpick over PC and Mac prices, when comparing brand name to brand name, they're generally comparable in a way that SGI's workstations simply never were: a midline Octane workstation would be three or four times as expensive as a high-end PC. SGI's off-the-shelf software selection was extremely limited, tailored just for their niche markets (yes, you could compile open source software, but that's not generally what one bought an SGI workstation to do); OS X's selection is limited compared to Windows, but a couple orders of magnitude greater than Irix's. Apple hardware is (relatively) unique, but there's a wide variety of third-party manufacturers making peripherals, most of which use industry-standard connections -- none of which SGI did.
It's certainly possible that Apple computer hardware will die off in the long run -- but as cynics have noted, the death of the company has been predicted for well over a decade now. What killed SGI workstations, ultimately, was that they were in a specialized niche rather than a consumer market, and commodity hardware caught up with them. Apple may have positioned themselves as a "boutique" computer maker, but they're still very firmly in the consumer space.
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.
Goto SGI's product line.
Turn left.
emt 377 emt 4
Thanks for the advice - yes I mean it.
I started with SunOS so the shift to Solaris broke a lot of my code. The only codebase of mine that has been truly stable is in Common LISP and that is because I avoided a lot of the Symbolics specializations. But as a class I find that *NIX runs the gnu tools which still work whatever OS I'm on unless it is Windows (Cygwin is Ok but...sigh...the underlying Windows shortcomings still show through), or a commercial *NIX that is no longer supported (Thinking Machines code is now useless too...sigh...got some of that). My stuff coded to X works fine on Linux so the API is not that different.
System administration across distros is a pain - you are right there. And if I use a library that is new or only available for a distro then I am sure to also see my intellectual investment look less than shiny.
I'll look for that article, I'm sure it will be interesting.
-Richard
1) not overpriced, a MacPro can be had for cheaper than a Dell
Can a fullblown iMac be had (with monitor, keyboard, mouse and all) for cheaper than $500 which is what I bought my bro last month (A full 17' TFT with 80GB deal, Pentium 4 3GHz 512 RAM etc).
Here's the article online. It was on Linux Journal of May, my mistake, sorry!..
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.
It wasn't always the case, and there are exceptions, the more popular Linux gets though the less portable the OSS code. Yes, you have source and can edited it, but that's not the point. OSS software used to be more easily portable than it is now. We have a generation of coders that don't have experience of a wide range of architectures and as such include architecture specific things in the code without realising they are doing so.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Ignoring the MIPS systems, SGI's current hardware product line basically consists of IA64 Linux workstations (Prism), IA64 Linux servers/supercomputers (Altix) and EM64T Linux servers (Altix XE). No current Windows systems although they've tried several times in the past.
Come to think of it I could swear I saw an EOL announcement for the Prism line earlier this year on www.sgi.com, but I can't find it any more....
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).
Don't compare apples to oranges (no pun intended). The HD size on the iMacs is at least twice as large as the Dell, they have Core 2 Duos, PCI express slots. non-integrated graphics, etc. The reason MacPros and Dells are compared is that they can be configured identically. You can't make a Dell an iMac no matter how hard you try.
"The more corrupt a society, the more numerous are its laws." -Tacticus
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
GRIO is exactly the thing that most impressed me. Yes, the NUMA stuff was excellent, but that was mostly brought along from Cray. GRIO, however, allowed all of that high-speed processing to account for something - assuring that writes to disk can actually keep up with the thousand plus CPUs, for example. Lots of media companies use MIPS/IRIX systems specifically because the applications take advantage of GRIO. You can't afford to lose packets when dealing with high-dollar customers and their precious HD content, for example.
Doing anything equivalent to GRIO in Linux is downright impossible. The current way of thinking is to always assume that there is enough overcapcity in the hardware to manage. This isn't always a good assumption in demanding applications.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
What will SGI do? Make overpriced IA-32, X64 or IA-64 clones?
Whoever marked this troll doubtless hasn't used an O2. I did, for two years. They were too slow the day they hit the market, way behind the PIIs they competed with, at 1/5th the cost. Their main selling point was that they ran Irix, which was a the time ahead of Windows NT by a mile.