...And the Dell has a faster CPU (the 1 GHz G4 isn't going to beat a 2 GHz P4M in most tasks)...
Very true, but keep in mind that the hardware will have to throttle down the P4M to less than 2 GHz for maximum battery life. The PowerBook can run at full speed without much impact. (Though the PB *can* throttle down for low-cpu tasks -- watching a DVD, etc -- for even longer battery life). Maybe a good laptop spec could be "number of cpu cycles per battery". In my experience, a laptop needs to be fast *and* have a long battery life.
...Both have CD-RW/DVD-R's...
The Dell, at the price you quoted, does not have a CDR-RW/DVD-R -- it only has a CDRW/DVD-ROM, it cannot record DVDs. The PowerBook can.
My primary workstation for almost 4 years has been an SGI Indigo2 workstation (R10K, Solid Impact graphics). The workhorse has survived falling out of my pickup, winters of static electricity zapping projects hanging off the serial ports, frequent brownouts, and constant hot swapping of ps/2 and scsi devices. I've upgraded and downgraded the graphics cards once or twice a year, often trading with friends and roommates. I could probably field strip the machine blindfolded. I installed IRIX 6.5.2 in early 1999 and have successfuly run the OS updates and installed the newest freeware release every quarter since then. I still haven't had a need to do a reinstall and am currently running 6.5.17m + Feb 2003 Freeware.
Sure beats my PCs, Mac, and Sun for reliability of both hardware and software... maybe it's the fact this beast weighs over 50 lbs!
SGI's first attempt at Wintel PCs, the overengineered and overdue 320 and 540, used a prom interface similar to what SGI MIPS/IRIX, Sun, and modern Apples use. There were both graphical and text/command-line interfaces available. A fellow could use this nifty maintanence system to choose the boot device, get system info, even run some diagnostics... just like a "real" workstation. Pretty neat, but probably one of the reasons that these cool machines can't run anything newer than Windows 2000.
I don't know about HPaq or IBM, but I do know that SGI uses an ARCS PROM. It's similar to OpenBoot/OpenFirmware, and can be used for booting into other OSes (NetBSD/MIPS for one), but it's not quite as feature-filled. Newer SGIs (Origin 300, Origin 3000, Fuel, Altix) also have an "L1" controller system that keeps track of temperatures, module power, system partitioning, etc. It's somewhat similar to Sun's LOM controllers, though several SGI L1 devices can be connected to an L2 controller (touch screen LCD controller) or to an L3 controller (a 1U rackmount PC running Linux driving a fancy GUI and web interface).
Which is lamer... - Microsoft, for seeking people who register Microsoft software for their "switcher" ads. - People who actually register Microsoft software. I wasn't even able to use Windows XP or Office XP without first registering the danged things. Granted, it was a quick process, but it still had to be done. I wonder if false user information could be used for privacy issues. I could *maybe* understand gun registration, but mandantory software registration boggles my mind. We're talking Windows and Office... not Maya or ProE.
I have an expensive Mac. It strikes me as slow, sometimes. I get annoyed when software comes out for the PC first. But I'm not giving it up for anything. I hear you about the performance issue. I've found the G4/MacOSX combo to have "baffling" performance. Many apps and many functions are zippy as can be, but yet there are still a few areas that can be slow. Resizing a window, for example, is pretty slow for all but the most lightweight applications. Apple's iCal calendar app also has a tendancy to chug pretty hard. Yet this very same machine is an absolute video monster. Final Cut Pro runs like a dream, I'm using "just" an 867 MHz machine, yet I couldn't really ask for any faster video editing performance. The app's gui is fast, scrubbing thru frames is fast, applying layers is fast. It's great! True, I don't do much compositing, so my render times are almost instant... but then, neither do most folks. (though I have heard that some folks are finding iMovie 3 to be somewhat slow) I've also found Photoshop to be extremely fast for the images I work with (never larger than 2048x2048). Others have reported zippy compile and run performance of command-line apps, though I haven't tried this out myself.
Perhaps Apple is still in the early stages of tweaking Mac OS X... maybe they're working on the demanding areas first and will eventually touch up the more minor performance issues (window resize, for example).
Why spent $190 on fucking BBEdit when I can just run vi, emacs Granted Macs cost a bit more than similar IA-32 PCs, but Mac OS X does ship with vi, emacs, pico, and a few other text editors. There's also a graphical text editor, sorta like wordpad/maxwell. There aren't too many reasons to buy BBEdit anymore, especially if you're good with emacs. The only machines I still use BBEdit on are a first gen iMac running Mac OS 9.2.2 and a Quadra running 7.6.1. And even then, I use the free "lite" version of BBEdit.
Whoa! You remember that too? I love the last part of the gorilla series of Mathnet... the gorilla was climbing on one of the letters of the Hollywood sign. I knew "George Frankley" would find him! Man, it's been years!
Yeardley Smith (the voice of Lisa) is kinda cute in a geeky foreign way... I saw an interview of her a few years ago. Apparently more than a few guys have told her that it's their fantasy to make love to her while she screams the famous "More More More!" Lisa Simpson line.
I just got done trying out this release of GNOME on a SunBlade 150 (550 MHz UltraSPARC II, 512 MB RAM, PGX-64 graphics). It works and it's kinda snazzy, but it's mighty slow. I don't know if it's the fault of my low end hardware or maybe the software itself, but this beast really makes my machine chug.
While Motif has often been considered bloated in the past, CDE (which is Motif based) runs like a champ on this machine. The look and feel is pretty stark, but it does the job and is easy on my hardware.
Hopefully Sun will have GNOME zipping along by the time 2.1 ships. I would imagine there are still many tweaks that can be implemented.
I'm going to try not to make this sound like a troll... but it's hard to be politically correct while looking a decade down the road....
Like IBM, SGI is also kinda-sorta planning on moving entirely to Linux in time. This makes me wonder what the long-term path is...
Once upon a time IBM and SGI were working with oldschool AT&T SysV Unix and BSD Unix, after years of tweaks, overhauls, and rewrites, each company ended up with their own distinct version of Unix. Obviously this won't happen immediately with Linux, but I would venture to guess that there will be significant forking over time. Right now SGI is using a slightly modified version of Red Hat 7.2 on their Altix machines (basicly Red Hat plus the patches from their "ProPack" overlay). As time goes on I would almost bet that the long term goals of IBM, SGI and others will not match up to those of RedHat and other distro builders. I have a feeling that, oh, maybe 10 years down the road each major big iron builder (IBM, HP, maybe SGI and Sun) will have their own distinct (and somewhat "weird") version of Linux.... and soon the term "Linux" will be as generic as "Unix".
This makes me wonder.... why bother with the Make-Work of moving to Linux in the first place? Why no keep working on the existing tuned kernels of AIX, IRIX, Tru64, etc?
Supposedly he began supporting Lisa and her mother after he left Apple (and started NeXT and Pixar). I also belive he's currently paying for her Stanford tuition. There was a blurb about this in an article awhile back, I think it was either Forbes or WSJ.
In my neck of the woods (northern Texas) it's almost impossible to find an FM station that isn't part of clearchannel's network. Lots of ads, nation-wide contests, clearchannel-approved news/propaganda. Et cetra.
SGI's Altix machines use Itanium 2 CPUs (up to 150 watts per CPU). They have **VERY** advanced cooling subsystems. This is not the MIPS/IRIX Origin series, this is the Itanium2/Linux series.
Syntax Error... Matlab -or- Maple vs Mathematica
on
Mathematica vs. Matlab?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I would suggest doing some more research about Matlab and Mathematica (as well as Maple).
Matlab is mostly used for creation of and use of complex algorithms, DSP simulations, and other "heavy math" tasks. It's a great swiss army knife and integrates easily with most C compilers for compiled-performance (rather than interpreted). One of the many "modules" included with Matlab is a symbolic math package based on the Maple engine (see below).
Mathematica and Maple are little more than symbolic math packages. (Don't get me wrong, they can do A LOT, but neither comes close to the full Matlab package). Each has its pros and cons, but either will do quite well for any math undergrad university student and most grad students. The merits of Mathematica vs Maple are often heavily debated on the usenet and in other forums.
Matlab, Mathematica, and Maple are all very powerful packages... they can do **WAY** more than any of the lame "MathCAD" type apps you probably used in high school.
All three are available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and most flavors of Unix (Solaris, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, Tru64). Each has a rather simple interface and "looks" like a native application with the exception of the Linux/Unix version of Matlab -- it's a quick port from Windows with some lame crossplatform toolkit. Its GUI widgets look as though they're straight out of Windows. This cannot be changed without a lot of hackery. Despite the ugly interface, I would recommend Matlab for students... the student price is about the same as that of Mathematica or Maple, yet includes so much more (plus all of the symbolic math features straight from Maple 8).
If you don't need (or don't want) all that Matlab offers, Maple may do the trick for you. I used Maple 6 for years and only recently moved to Matlab (for compatibility reasons). Maple, even the current Maple 8, is a clean lightweight application. It's easy on the disk and ram, and even easier on the CPU. And, (IMHO), it does just as much as Mathematica would for me.
Also, all three have a full-featured command line interface alternative to their GUIs. Learning how to key in equations without the mouse and tool palettes will help you in the long run -- you'll be able to enter data much faster. Brushing up on TeX and/or MathML will also prove helpful.
These days, my workstation runs little more than Matlab, LyX, and sometimes Framemaker.
The joystick for the Atari 2600 is digital, very digital. Very simple design, the circuit board inside has 5 membrane-style contacts... up, down, left, right, fire. I used to rig up old Atari joysticks to my homebrew robots for crude remote control.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...And the Dell has a faster CPU (the 1 GHz G4 isn't going to beat a 2 GHz P4M in most tasks)...
...Both have CD-RW/DVD-R's...
Very true, but keep in mind that the hardware will have to throttle down the P4M to less than 2 GHz for maximum battery life. The PowerBook can run at full speed without much impact. (Though the PB *can* throttle down for low-cpu tasks -- watching a DVD, etc -- for even longer battery life). Maybe a good laptop spec could be "number of cpu cycles per battery". In my experience, a laptop needs to be fast *and* have a long battery life.
The Dell, at the price you quoted, does not have a CDR-RW/DVD-R -- it only has a CDRW/DVD-ROM, it cannot record DVDs. The PowerBook can.
So in fact the question is why is the Apple so heavy...
The Apple is made from Aluminum -- skin, frame, and all.
Compare these two photos:
Inspiron 8500
PowerBook G4
I know, I know... it's just the bottom of the machine, but you gotta love style.
No, they don't.
My primary workstation for almost 4 years has been an SGI Indigo2 workstation (R10K, Solid Impact graphics). The workhorse has survived falling out of my pickup, winters of static electricity zapping projects hanging off the serial ports, frequent brownouts, and constant hot swapping of ps/2 and scsi devices. I've upgraded and downgraded the graphics cards once or twice a year, often trading with friends and roommates. I could probably field strip the machine blindfolded. I installed IRIX 6.5.2 in early 1999 and have successfuly run the OS updates and installed the newest freeware release every quarter since then. I still haven't had a need to do a reinstall and am currently running 6.5.17m + Feb 2003 Freeware.
Sure beats my PCs, Mac, and Sun for reliability of both hardware and software... maybe it's the fact this beast weighs over 50 lbs!
SGI's first attempt at Wintel PCs, the overengineered and overdue 320 and 540, used a prom interface similar to what SGI MIPS/IRIX, Sun, and modern Apples use. There were both graphical and text/command-line interfaces available. A fellow could use this nifty maintanence system to choose the boot device, get system info, even run some diagnostics... just like a "real" workstation. Pretty neat, but probably one of the reasons that these cool machines can't run anything newer than Windows 2000.
I don't know about HPaq or IBM, but I do know that SGI uses an ARCS PROM. It's similar to OpenBoot/OpenFirmware, and can be used for booting into other OSes (NetBSD/MIPS for one), but it's not quite as feature-filled. Newer SGIs (Origin 300, Origin 3000, Fuel, Altix) also have an "L1" controller system that keeps track of temperatures, module power, system partitioning, etc. It's somewhat similar to Sun's LOM controllers, though several SGI L1 devices can be connected to an L2 controller (touch screen LCD controller) or to an L3 controller (a 1U rackmount PC running Linux driving a fancy GUI and web interface).
Which is lamer...
- Microsoft, for seeking people who register Microsoft software for their "switcher" ads.
- People who actually register Microsoft software.
I wasn't even able to use Windows XP or Office XP without first registering the danged things. Granted, it was a quick process, but it still had to be done. I wonder if false user information could be used for privacy issues. I could *maybe* understand gun registration, but mandantory software registration boggles my mind. We're talking Windows and Office... not Maya or ProE.
I have an expensive Mac. It strikes me as slow, sometimes. I get annoyed when software comes out for the PC first. But I'm not giving it up for anything.
I hear you about the performance issue. I've found the G4/MacOSX combo to have "baffling" performance. Many apps and many functions are zippy as can be, but yet there are still a few areas that can be slow. Resizing a window, for example, is pretty slow for all but the most lightweight applications. Apple's iCal calendar app also has a tendancy to chug pretty hard. Yet this very same machine is an absolute video monster. Final Cut Pro runs like a dream, I'm using "just" an 867 MHz machine, yet I couldn't really ask for any faster video editing performance. The app's gui is fast, scrubbing thru frames is fast, applying layers is fast. It's great! True, I don't do much compositing, so my render times are almost instant... but then, neither do most folks. (though I have heard that some folks are finding iMovie 3 to be somewhat slow) I've also found Photoshop to be extremely fast for the images I work with (never larger than 2048x2048). Others have reported zippy compile and run performance of command-line apps, though I haven't tried this out myself.
Perhaps Apple is still in the early stages of tweaking Mac OS X... maybe they're working on the demanding areas first and will eventually touch up the more minor performance issues (window resize, for example).
Why spent $190 on fucking BBEdit when I can just run vi, emacs
Granted Macs cost a bit more than similar IA-32 PCs, but Mac OS X does ship with vi, emacs, pico, and a few other text editors. There's also a graphical text editor, sorta like wordpad/maxwell. There aren't too many reasons to buy BBEdit anymore, especially if you're good with emacs. The only machines I still use BBEdit on are a first gen iMac running Mac OS 9.2.2 and a Quadra running 7.6.1. And even then, I use the free "lite" version of BBEdit.
Whoa! You remember that too? I love the last part of the gorilla series of Mathnet... the gorilla was climbing on one of the letters of the Hollywood sign. I knew "George Frankley" would find him!
Man, it's been years!
Yeardley Smith (the voice of Lisa) is kinda cute in a geeky foreign way... I saw an interview of her a few years ago. Apparently more than a few guys have told her that it's their fantasy to make love to her while she screams the famous "More More More!" Lisa Simpson line.
I just got done trying out this release of GNOME on a SunBlade 150 (550 MHz UltraSPARC II, 512 MB RAM, PGX-64 graphics). It works and it's kinda snazzy, but it's mighty slow. I don't know if it's the fault of my low end hardware or maybe the software itself, but this beast really makes my machine chug.
While Motif has often been considered bloated in the past, CDE (which is Motif based) runs like a champ on this machine. The look and feel is pretty stark, but it does the job and is easy on my hardware.
Hopefully Sun will have GNOME zipping along by the time 2.1 ships. I would imagine there are still many tweaks that can be implemented.
I'm going to try not to make this sound like a troll... but it's hard to be politically correct while looking a decade down the road....
Like IBM, SGI is also kinda-sorta planning on moving entirely to Linux in time. This makes me wonder what the long-term path is...
Once upon a time IBM and SGI were working with oldschool AT&T SysV Unix and BSD Unix, after years of tweaks, overhauls, and rewrites, each company ended up with their own distinct version of Unix. Obviously this won't happen immediately with Linux, but I would venture to guess that there will be significant forking over time. Right now SGI is using a slightly modified version of Red Hat 7.2 on their Altix machines (basicly Red Hat plus the patches from their "ProPack" overlay). As time goes on I would almost bet that the long term goals of IBM, SGI and others will not match up to those of RedHat and other distro builders. I have a feeling that, oh, maybe 10 years down the road each major big iron builder (IBM, HP, maybe SGI and Sun) will have their own distinct (and somewhat "weird") version of Linux.... and soon the term "Linux" will be as generic as "Unix".
This makes me wonder.... why bother with the Make-Work of moving to Linux in the first place? Why no keep working on the existing tuned kernels of AIX, IRIX, Tru64, etc?
I would love a new silver or blue iMac, but it (and the eMac) are currently only available in iBookish white.
Supposedly he began supporting Lisa and her mother after he left Apple (and started NeXT and Pixar). I also belive he's currently paying for her Stanford tuition. There was a blurb about this in an article awhile back, I think it was either Forbes or WSJ.
ClearChannel killed the radio fan.
In my neck of the woods (northern Texas) it's almost impossible to find an FM station that isn't part of clearchannel's network. Lots of ads, nation-wide contests, clearchannel-approved news/propaganda. Et cetra.
Yuck.
Check out this clip from their new (Konq-based) web browser... they're using Slashdot as an example website!l
http://www.apple.com/safari/theater/bookmarks.htm
SGI's Altix machines use Itanium 2 CPUs (up to 150 watts per CPU). They have **VERY** advanced cooling subsystems. This is not the MIPS/IRIX Origin series, this is the Itanium2/Linux series.
I would suggest doing some more research about Matlab and Mathematica (as well as Maple).
Matlab is mostly used for creation of and use of complex algorithms, DSP simulations, and other "heavy math" tasks. It's a great swiss army knife and integrates easily with most C compilers for compiled-performance (rather than interpreted). One of the many "modules" included with Matlab is a symbolic math package based on the Maple engine (see below).
Mathematica and Maple are little more than symbolic math packages. (Don't get me wrong, they can do A LOT, but neither comes close to the full Matlab package). Each has its pros and cons, but either will do quite well for any math undergrad university student and most grad students. The merits of Mathematica vs Maple are often heavily debated on the usenet and in other forums.
Matlab, Mathematica, and Maple are all very powerful packages... they can do **WAY** more than any of the lame "MathCAD" type apps you probably used in high school.
All three are available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and most flavors of Unix (Solaris, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, Tru64). Each has a rather simple interface and "looks" like a native application with the exception of the Linux/Unix version of Matlab -- it's a quick port from Windows with some lame crossplatform toolkit. Its GUI widgets look as though they're straight out of Windows. This cannot be changed without a lot of hackery. Despite the ugly interface, I would recommend Matlab for students... the student price is about the same as that of Mathematica or Maple, yet includes so much more (plus all of the symbolic math features straight from Maple 8).
If you don't need (or don't want) all that Matlab offers, Maple may do the trick for you. I used Maple 6 for years and only recently moved to Matlab (for compatibility reasons). Maple, even the current Maple 8, is a clean lightweight application. It's easy on the disk and ram, and even easier on the CPU. And, (IMHO), it does just as much as Mathematica would for me.
Also, all three have a full-featured command line interface alternative to their GUIs. Learning how to key in equations without the mouse and tool palettes will help you in the long run -- you'll be able to enter data much faster. Brushing up on TeX and/or MathML will also prove helpful.
These days, my workstation runs little more than Matlab, LyX, and sometimes Framemaker.
The joystick for the Atari 2600 is digital, very digital. Very simple design, the circuit board inside has 5 membrane-style contacts... up, down, left, right, fire. I used to rig up old Atari joysticks to my homebrew robots for crude remote control.
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.
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.
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 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.