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."

Comments

MIPS is going away?

[EvanED]

Now what narrowly-deployed architecture for which everyone runs a CPU simulator will be taught in computer organization and assembly language classes?

Re:MIPS is going away?

[OrangeTide]

Systems with a clean instruction set are apparently unpopular in the real world.

PowerPC is rather nice, but it's not as clean. (but it is easier to use)

Re:MIPS is going away?

[AKAImBatman]

Now what narrowly-deployed architecture for which everyone runs a CPU simulator will be taught in computer organization and assembly language classes?

Duh. They'll emulate the 6507 in the Atari 2600. That way they can run it on real, modern hardware! :P

Re:MIPS is going away?

[ajlitt]

MIPS isn't going away. MIPS is very popular for embedded video processing. TiVo is MIPS (now, at least), the PSP is MIPS, and many DVD players are based on a MIPS. MIPS is still popular because the ISA isn't patented and there are a number of compatible cores out there.

Re:MIPS is going away?

[10Ghz]

SGI MIPS-workstations are going away, MIPS itself is not going anywhere, It's still running in millions of embedded devices, and more will be announced in the future.

Re:MIPS is going away?

[LWATCDR]

I will answer. None at all.
This announcement is about the end of MIPS as a server and workstation platform. The vast majority of CPUs are not used for server or workstations. They live in toasters, DVD players, digital cameras, microwaves, and so on. In the real world very few people ever write assembly programs that run on a server or a workstation. However in the embedded space assembly is still pretty common.
MIPS isn't dead. MIPS servers are dead. MIPS lives on in many devices.

Irix was cracker paradise

[phayes]

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.

Too bad - MIPS was pretty

[Just Some Guy]

My computer architecture class textbook was based on MIPS, and after messing around with 68k and x86 assembler for years, its assembler was like a breath of fresh air. It had a truly elegant design, or so I thought, and it's a shame to see it die.

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.

Re:Too bad - MIPS was pretty

[mnmn]

MIPS was great and still has life left in it. However ARM has been bulldozing its way through recently in the higher embedded markets where MIPS was strong. Even AMD sold Alchemy eventually.

The embedded market was getting crowded, which is a good thing. The survival of the fittest gave us ARM instead of us being stuck with assembly codes like the PIC and x86.

Re:Too bad - MIPS was pretty

[be-fan]

It's quite true in a sense, though of course it depends on your definition of "great". If "great" is just someone who is very good at his/her job, then yes, you can be a "great" programmer without ever using Lisp. However, if you define "great" to mean somebody who really has a higher-level perspective about programming as a whole, then I'd have to say that you can't be "great" without experiencing Lisp or something like it.

Put simply, different languages represent different areas in the design space of programming languages. C represents one area, C++/Java/C# another set of closely-grouped areas, Ruby another, Python another, etc. Lisp represents a very large, and to many people used to C++/Java/etc, very novel portion of the design space, as does ML and its kin. A truely great programmer, then, must not only be proficient in the usage of a specific tool that represents a specific point in the design space, but must have a perspective of the whole design space. He must be able to look at specific solutions, and realize when they are just instances of a higher-order, more generalized principle. The only way to gain that perspective is to explore the design space, and mastering Lisp is a way to explore a very large and unique part of that space.

There's a saying that "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail". This refers to a general notion that our tools limit the ways in which we think about solving problems. Let me give you a concrete example. Lisp has a feature called multi-method dispatch, in which the target of a polymorphic call is decided by the types of more than one of the arguments. To someone who has only ever used a language with single-dispatch (ie: C++/Java/C#'s virtual methods), the very idea of using multiple-dispatch to solve a particular problem never even comes to mind. He makes due with what he has, using techniques like the "visitor pattern", and sits content thinking that this is the best he can do. Somebody who knows Lisp, on the other hand, might still have to use the visitor pattern (because his boss forces him to use Java), but he'll realize that its just a way to do double-dispatch in a single-dispatch language, and that increased understanding of the nature of the solution will help him write better code.

FOSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they should release IRIX under the GPL and let the community maintain it!

Re:FOSS

[archen]

I'm not sure where the logic for something like this comes from. Like there is an infinite ammount of people who will work on every project ever abandoned. If IRIX was so wildly popular, I doubt SGI would stop working on it. I'm sure there's lots of useful code in there, but I'm also sure it's littered with stuff that has a patent on it as well. SGI is still a company that seeks to survive (I would assume), and isn't doing so well. They are in no position to work on figuring out licence issues to put IRIX under the GPL.

Well this is the first of the old school Unix's to fall that I can think of. AIX and Solaris will probably be last. The ones maintained by Hewlet-Compaqard will be next in line after the death of SCO derivatives.

Re:FOSS

[Burdell]

The Alpha and Tru64 Unix are going away first. The last order date for a new AlphaServer is October 27, and (despite earlier Compaq and HP promises and guarantees) Tru64 and its related technologies die with the Alpha.

ARM is patented

[tepples]

ARM?

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.

(arcem isn't maintained, from the looks of it, but it's a neat pure-hardware-level ARM platform simulator.)

The most popular ARM platform simulator nowadays seems to be VisualBoyAdvance.

Re:ARM is patented

[dgatwood]

The ARM architecture, on the other hand, is still patented.

Those patents should all have expired by now, at least for the original architecture. Patents filed prior to June 8, 1994 have a term of 20 years from filing date or 17 years fro issue date, whichever is greater. ARM1 was in development testing in 1985 and shipped in 1986. Unless some of those patents too more than four years to be issued, they should be in the clear by now. Of course, you'll have to do a search to be completely certain, but....

The thumb instruction set, on the other hand, does have currently active patents, I believe.

A discussion of this issue can be found here.

IRIX==Motorbike.

[sbaker]

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.

It's a UNIX system. I know this!

[earbenT]

Lex's skills are useless now. :(

Such a crowded graveyard, big deal.

[museumpeace]

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.

Re:Such a crowded graveyard, big deal.

[1lus10n]

True, but we could still use technology driven companies like DEC, Sun and yes even SGI.

When left to their own devices most of the large computer companies (IBM, HP, Dell, even Intel, AMD, Cisco etc etc) do very little revolutionary or insightful things. They usually tread water with minor "improvements" until someone comes along and kicks them in the pants (see: IBM vs Apple, IBM vs DEC, Intel vs AMD etc etc) with some better technology.

If all we have left are the "big guys" where is the next revolution going to come from ?

Re:Pick an OS with staying power

[jgrahn]

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.

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.

If you read all the way to the bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of us who still work at SGI and continue to support this product line,
also of importance at the bottom of the article is:

SGI is also committed to offering our customer a full level of support needed to protect their investment in SGI products. End of support (EOS) for MIPS/IRIX products is currently scheduled for no sooner than December 2013. SGI Technology Solutions is continuously evaluating the demand for extended support and may consider longer extensions if necessary.

Re:SPARC?

[E-Lad]

I think MIPS was the popular arch to learn asm on. Here at UMBC, MIPS is still what the assembly programming courses revolve around. In the mid 90s, SGI/IRIX was popular in (american, at least) universities. This course is pretty much one of the only reasons why we keep a few O200s around (including a 24-CPU Challenge XL... well, okay, it's now 16 CPUs, because we seem to be seeing one CPU board die each year). It's funny because back in the 90s, the Challenge XL was billed to faculty as a high-speed research computing server, which it was - at the time. Some of the old timers believe that's still is true today, probably because they just don't know better. 16x 200Mhz CPUs ain't all that, no matter what arch you're on.

Hopfully we can convince the CS dept to move their course off of MIPS so we can push these aging servers off the end of the loading dock. SPARC or x86/64 would be the alternatives here.

Re:Pick an OS with staying power

[iggymanz]

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)

IRIX was obviously going away.

[Medievalist]

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...

Re:SPARC?

[LWATCDR]

X86!
using the X86 to teach assembly language is like using Perl to teach object oriented programing.

No need to move off MIPS, just use an emulator.

Re:Why aren't they selling x86 and Linux?

[kimvette]

Uh, they did, and that is what killed them.

No problem: COMPAT_IRIX in NetBSD/sgimips

[hubertf]

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/.

Re:Pick an OS with staying power

[thanasakis]

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)