Fool, the R16k was based on the R10k core which was designed by MIPS not SGI; SGI doesn't even have a CPU development team any more and doesn't even own the trademark for r16k. The R16k was a "tweak" of the R10k core by _MIPS_.
100% False. SGI bought and merged with MIPS in 1992. They then designed T5 (R10K) in 1994-5. They spun-off the embeded section of MIPS in 1998. SGI still retains their own MIPS development team and are actively working on several processors. Remember MIPS is an open platform, anyone can get a license and make chips. And what of SGI not owning the trademark? They license the name from MIPS Technologies, so...???
N0 (R16K) was a big redesign, the begining of a new line, and N1 and N2 will be all new designs.
You've also skewed those SPECfp numbers. R14K is supported in many systems and you chose to quote the slowest system.
SGI Origin 3200 1X 600MHz R14k 499
Also the R14000A is an older CPU and the Itanium2 is just newly released. More fair would be to quote numbers for the new MIPS CPUs, unfortuneately they're unavailable. But then it would also pay to step back and realize that the current SPEC CPU benchmarks have several flaws, being most noteably used by SUN, which render them unreliable.
So you can quote SPEC left and right, the plain facts come back to applications performance. And for most of my apps the SGI systems are the fastest and most scaleable prepackaged computers you can buy.
It's plenty crowded in New York damnit. We could use some massive convergence over here.
When will we see an all-in-one one-stop WiFi delivered service (Internet/email/news, VoIP/telephone/voicemail, Mobile service, including WiFi, Digital Cable & Movie on Demand)?
Cheesier? I can't say that I like their latest round of gear but for a long time SGI had the coolest looking workstations in the world. Nothing Apple has produced even comes close to the design of the O2.
The granite colored monitors, keyboards, and mice weren't spray painted. The plastic was molded that way, and it's very subtle and attractive. The Indy looks blue from a distance but up close it looks like a slab of blue granite.
4Dwm is one of the best environments to *work* in. And if there is something you don't like it is easy to change. Take a look at some of the screenshots over at Nekochan.net: http://www.nekochan.net/gallery/
Speaking as someone who used to sit in front of a computer all day and model in Pro/E, money aside there is no better place to be than in front of an SGI.
Not to say that SGI is blameless or perfect. For a long time they were ridding high, their stuff was great, and by all accounts they were the coolest company to work for. But they fell from grace and have been horribly missmanaged by several CEOs and made several dumb moves. Right now their CPUs are lagging (though not as much as you'd think) because under the last CEO they severely slowed development in anticipation of moving to Itanium. They messed around with x86, and they didn't concentrate on lowering prices, all bad moves. Now they're back on track, concentrating on what they're good at, MIPS development is raging again and lots of good things are in the works. Their golden era is over, and it's foolish to hope for a return to those times, but I'd still like to see them back on top again and selling products I can justify buying.
You didn't look hard enough, though one shouldn't have to look hard for such info.
Download the 'Onyx4 At A Glance' PDF, it mentions MIPS in there.
SGI often skimps on many details. Some possible reasons:
1. The extreme modularity of their systems means they assume you already know certain specs. An 'Onyx4' is really just an 'Onyx350' with this new graphics option (UltimateVision) and a new color scheme. The real news is the new ATI-based graphics option. 2. They intend to sell both MIPS (Origin) and Itanium2 (Altix) systems with this new graphics option and call the product 'Onyx4' so they leave most of the website literature open-ended. 3. They will shortly release their new R18000 CPU so why not leave the website docs open-ended. 4. They're SGI, they don't give a shit about jerks cruising the website, and they only care about multi-million dollar orders, so why go to the trouble of making everything clear and simple for people who aren't your customers?
The 'at a glance' datasheet specifies MIPS R16000 CPUs. From http://www.sgi.com/visualization/onyx4/ataglance.p df
Silicon Graphics Onyx4 UltimateVision System Key Specifications Incredibly compact form factors - 8 CPUs and 4 pipes in an under-the-desk form factor (20"H x 12"W x 34"D) - 16 CPUs and 8 pipes in a deskside configuration 17U high - 32 CPUs and 24 pipes in a single 39U rack! Specifically designed for advanced display environments - Able to drive a 2 x 9M pixel LCD displays at a power user price point - Breathtaking fidelity, power, and interactivity on over 100M pixels of display Tremendous system infrastructure using the SGI® NUMA scalable architecture: - Up to 32 graphics pipes per system - Up to 64 advanced MIPS® CPUs per system - Up to 128GB of high-performance system memory - Up to 64 PCI-X slots delivery unparalleled network and storage bandwidth - Support for dozens of professional audio and video streams - SGI® IRIX® 6.5.20 64-bit operating system with a heterogeneous SAN filesystem - Larger systems possible through custom bids
I agree, I'm no fan of the latest-greatest upgrade-fanatic crowd and companies playing the same game.
In contrast the current major.minor relase of SGI's IRIX (6.5) will run on machines sailing by 12 years old (Indigo). Ditto for the latest quarterly release (6.5.20). To me this is pretty amazing considering that 6.5 was ready in about 1998 whilst the Indy and Indigo were new in 1993 and 1991 respectively, and both hit end of production before 1998. What's even more amazing is that new versions of IRIX run faster on old hardware than previous version. Combine this with SGIs commitment to continuously and carefully evolve their OS with a quarterly release scheme and still maintain huge backwards & platform compatibility, and you have one hell of a nice setup for hobbyists, students, and small businesses, or anyone in the market for a 2nd hand machine.
It would be great if other companies ditched their 'big bang,' redesign-everything, candy coated and bloated, useless bloody edge, never fix the bugs just get some new ones, jokey GUIs, and all that mess they call software design, and emulated SGI. I'm looking in your direction PTC.
Well as anyone who's been paying attention should know, SGI appears to be back on the ball. And they're comming up on releasing the R18K, which is supposed to be a massive jump. And their next-gen graphics are just around the corner.
So wait and see but hopefully most of these complaints will be fixed shortly, except of course for the bitching about the price, SGIs will always be expensive.
These are the kinds of posts I like to read. Sweet, sweet first hand info.
It all comes back to your app(s). All this general talk is just chattering. SGI systems can be amazingly fast for some things, and disappointingly slow for others. Based on my experience I wouldn't buy a new Fuel for MCAD, unless perhaps I was working on a huge project and needed the 64-bit memory space (and even then I'd probably buy a HP zx6000). But I would buy as many Origin350s as I could afford for CFD.
SGI spun off the embeded/licensed stuff. They still retain their own design team and are still producing new workstation & server CPUs. MIPS lives on in embedded? Well yeah. They also live on as the heart of SGIs current main product line.
And I believe MIPS switched to interlocked pipeline stages with the R4400.
SGI MIPS cpus are on the bleeding edge of *manufacturing* techniques, more so than AMD or Intel. The latest chips (N0) are fabbed by NEC (Toshiba too?) on a 90nm ?8?-layer process with copper interconnects and so on. And SGI-NEC are blazing ahead to newer processes. The problem is that the chip design is lagging compared to the latest and greatest from Intel & AMD. They lost their focus, bet the farm on Itanium (which was years late), and played around with IA32 crap. Maybe if they hadn't followed this meandering course their MIPS cpus would still be on top of the charts. They're playing catch up now and it looks like they're doing a good job. Back on the ball as it were.
People I've talked to admit that their ranks have thinned but are quick to point out that SGI still has 1337 graphics d00dz. Not sure how to interpret that though.
I really hope so. SGI has let MIPS developement sort of lag. I'm sure it is all well and good for the big iron but a fast CPU would really give their desktop machines the needed kick in the ass.
Silicon Graphics Infinite Reality is basically a bunch of V12 Vpro graphic cards racked up with a compositor to coordinate them all.
Pretty impressive. And according to SGIs site they'll soon be releasing their next-gen graphics products, which are either really great, or just being over-hyped.
SGI sells mega-hardware (and buckets of support for it), IRIX isn't even a 'product' it is bundled with the hardware. Commodity shmodity. Their kit is what moves the business.
Even their Linux stuff runs on whiz-bang gear.
Their biggest threat isn't Linux per se, it's that filty cheap PCs are increasingly able to handle the same jobs as their mega-bucks systems.
real time on Silicon Graphics is much better than real time on any PC platform I've used (no such thing as guaranteed rate I/O on PCs yet?). However the PC is much much cheaper per unit of performance. I guess if you're clever enough to get what you want out of something cheap then hats off. Silicon Graphics is really the better/nicer/cooler/more elegant solution, iff you've got the money.
"Also they consume more power than an equivalent PC in most cases, cost more to upgrade if there even is an upgrade path... The only benefit of those machines is that you can sometimes get them for free."
The Indy cosumes very little power (175W), especially with XL graphics. I'm unsure about the Indigo but I would be surprised if it sucked more power than a modern Athlon PC. The old 4Ds and the Challange/Onyx systems sure eat power though... ever seen a 1500W 3-phase PSU? As per upgrade cost... depends on where you buy parts. Most resellers are priced one or two orders of magnitude too high. I freuqently buy whole systems on eBay for very cheap, then swap components and resell to offset costs. The biggest problem is the limited upgradeability of the older systems.
"Linux doesn't support SGI machines very well because even today anything worth using is generally too expensive (or too large and power hungry which also comes down to expense) to bother with."
You can get a low spec second hand Octane for ~$200, but yes it does consume a lot of power. The best supported machine appears to be the Indy, which costs almost nothing and is a quiet little efficient pizza box.
"Also I think saying Linux will never run on MIPS like IRIX is probably deadly incorrect. When the MIPS-based SGIs (near all of them of course) come down to a more reasonable price and you can't walk down the sidewalk without tripping over an O2, by which time I fully expect Linux to have surpassed IRIX in all areas..."
We're already at that point. There has been massive dumping of Octane systems over the last year. Even O2s are dirt cheap. I think in SoCal systems fall out of the sky and pile up on curbs ; ) Show me LINUX running on an O2 doing gauranteed-rate I/O for on-air graphics or LINUX using ICE then maybe I'll change my tune.
"... it will also at least approach the support-level of IRIX for the most common SGI hardware."
If by support you mean access to bug-fixes, new feature support, and other types of help provided for free by the LINUX community then yes. SGI has never been very friendly to hobbiests/students but recently they've been shitting on such users.
"Right now, there's not enough interest in advancing the sgimips-specific code in Linux because the machines are not ubiquitous enough."
There has been a SGI supported porting effort going on for almost ?3? years. And on top of that SGI has been GPLing some of their goodies, XFS comes to mind. Not to mention all the work they've done on LINUX. Despite all that work LINUX is still not a practical OS on any SGI machine. We'll see what 3 more years does but by then who will want to use an Indigo or an Indy?
"I think it's safe to say it's going to outlast IRIX and possibly SGI. So if it happens soon enough, IRIX may actually end up with WORSE support for interesting sgimips systems like indigo R4000, O2, and indy systems at the very least, and (As we are seeing) some of the relative "big iron"."
Possibly. Last I knew SGI had commited to providing IRIX/MIPS support till the end of the decade. The Indigo, Indy, Indigo2, and older systems are already End-of-Life (EOL) by SGI. Current IRIX releases still support these old systems but there is no gaurantee that this will continue. Someday IRIX 6.X or 7.X etc. will not support these machines. So I guess the benchmark for LINUX on these older systems is IRIX 6.5.
"So far SGI and IBM have both brought out powerhouse systems which run linux. I doubt this trend will change, except to speed up... "
Because it saves them money, it's is not necessarily the most elegant solution. SGI could not afford to port IRIX to IA/64. One of the sad things history proves is that long-term the best seldom wins, mediocrity flourishes.
"Nobody ever installs IRIX on low end PC hardware" because... YOU CAN'T!
"IRIX runs kinda slow on low end machines" != true
My Indy shipped with IRIX 5.3 back in 1996. Since then I've added more RAM and got a bigger disk. Now it runs 6.5.13. The only thing slow about this machine today is the old CPU and the old graphics... IRIX is superb. I have an Indigo Elan running 6.5.17 and it's is more pleasant to use than my Windows PC.
The downside of course is that these ~10 year old machines are slow when running first-class modern software (Maya, Pro/E, ANSYS, etc.) Though they are certainly fast enough for use as a basic desktop system (web/email, mp3, word-processing, etc.).
"... compared to LINUX"
Last I checked LINUX on MIPS (which only supported R4K Indigo & Indy with Entry/Newport graphics AFAIK) didn't even support a frame buffer, let alone the various video options, 3d graphics boards, and other multi-media goodies. Why bother with LINUX when it doesn't support any of the features that make an SGI an SGI? Besides LINUX will never run on MIPS like IRIX.
It has hardware cache coherence, though I can't find a doc which proclaims this. Give SGI a call, I'm sure a sales-droid can confirm this and an engineer can elaborate. Their old systems (Origin2000) were ccNUMA as are the Origin3000 systems. Read John Mashey's NUMAflex Essay for more info on Origin/ccNUMA/NUMAflex.
I believe MIPS is also an open architecture, so if that's important consider buying an SGI Origin.
Backplanes are so 1994.
NUMA == Non-Uniform Memory Access. There is still *one* kernel, cache coherency, and a shared memory space. Of course you can partition a system if you like.
"I'm afraid of these sudden changes in the direction of, let's face it, trendy technologies. Linux still has to prove itslef in systems with many CPUs."
This is not so sudden, they've been planning such a change for many years. Some of their delays have been tied to Intel's delays. SGI has had large development systems based on Itanium for a long time. And they've been trying to improve Linux (with some resistance) for some time.
"There really isn't any reason to chose Linux over IRIX, performance-wise."
Except that SGI has tied Linux to IA-64 at a certain price point. If you want a large SGI IA-64 system then you're stuck with Linux. If you need IRIX &/or > 64 CPUs in a single image system then you should buy an Origin.
It was determined a long time ago that porting IRIX was way too costly and complicated.
Slashdot Mirror
Fool, the R16k was based on the R10k core which was designed by MIPS not SGI; SGI doesn't even have a CPU development team any more and doesn't even own the trademark for r16k. The R16k was a "tweak" of the R10k core by _MIPS_.
...???
100% False. SGI bought and merged with MIPS in 1992. They then designed T5 (R10K) in 1994-5. They spun-off the embeded section of MIPS in 1998. SGI still retains their own MIPS development team and are actively working on several processors. Remember MIPS is an open platform, anyone can get a license and make chips. And what of SGI not owning the trademark? They license the name from MIPS Technologies, so
N0 (R16K) was a big redesign, the begining of a new line, and N1 and N2 will be all new designs.
You've also skewed those SPECfp numbers. R14K is supported in many systems and you chose to quote the slowest system.
SGI Origin 3200 1X 600MHz R14k 499
Also the R14000A is an older CPU and the Itanium2 is just newly released. More fair would be to quote numbers for the new MIPS CPUs, unfortuneately they're unavailable. But then it would also pay to step back and realize that the current SPEC CPU benchmarks have several flaws, being most noteably used by SUN, which render them unreliable.
So you can quote SPEC left and right, the plain facts come back to applications performance. And for most of my apps the SGI systems are the fastest and most scaleable prepackaged computers you can buy.
It's plenty crowded in New York damnit. We could use some massive convergence over here.
When will we see an all-in-one one-stop WiFi delivered service (Internet/email/news, VoIP/telephone/voicemail, Mobile service, including WiFi, Digital Cable & Movie on Demand)?
Cheesier? I can't say that I like their latest round of gear but for a long time SGI had the coolest looking workstations in the world. Nothing Apple has produced even comes close to the design of the O2.
The granite colored monitors, keyboards, and mice weren't spray painted. The plastic was molded that way, and it's very subtle and attractive. The Indy looks blue from a distance but up close it looks like a slab of blue granite.
4Dwm is one of the best environments to *work* in. And if there is something you don't like it is easy to change. Take a look at some of the screenshots over at Nekochan.net: http://www.nekochan.net/gallery/
Speaking as someone who used to sit in front of a computer all day and model in Pro/E, money aside there is no better place to be than in front of an SGI.
Not to say that SGI is blameless or perfect. For a long time they were ridding high, their stuff was great, and by all accounts they were the coolest company to work for. But they fell from grace and have been horribly missmanaged by several CEOs and made several dumb moves. Right now their CPUs are lagging (though not as much as you'd think) because under the last CEO they severely slowed development in anticipation of moving to Itanium. They messed around with x86, and they didn't concentrate on lowering prices, all bad moves. Now they're back on track, concentrating on what they're good at, MIPS development is raging again and lots of good things are in the works. Their golden era is over, and it's foolish to hope for a return to those times, but I'd still like to see them back on top again and selling products I can justify buying.
You didn't look hard enough, though one shouldn't have to look hard for such info.
Download the 'Onyx4 At A Glance' PDF, it mentions MIPS in there.
SGI often skimps on many details. Some possible reasons:
1. The extreme modularity of their systems means they assume you already know certain specs. An 'Onyx4' is really just an 'Onyx350' with this new graphics option (UltimateVision) and a new color scheme. The real news is the new ATI-based graphics option.
2. They intend to sell both MIPS (Origin) and Itanium2 (Altix) systems with this new graphics option and call the product 'Onyx4' so they leave most of the website literature open-ended.
3. They will shortly release their new R18000 CPU so why not leave the website docs open-ended.
4. They're SGI, they don't give a shit about jerks cruising the website, and they only care about multi-million dollar orders, so why go to the trouble of making everything clear and simple for people who aren't your customers?
Where did you get that bullet point from?
p df
The 'at a glance' datasheet specifies MIPS R16000 CPUs. From http://www.sgi.com/visualization/onyx4/ataglance.
Silicon Graphics Onyx4 UltimateVision System Key Specifications
Incredibly compact form factors
- 8 CPUs and 4 pipes in an under-the-desk form factor (20"H x 12"W x 34"D)
- 16 CPUs and 8 pipes in a deskside configuration 17U high
- 32 CPUs and 24 pipes in a single 39U rack!
Specifically designed for advanced display environments
- Able to drive a 2 x 9M pixel LCD displays at a power user price point
- Breathtaking fidelity, power, and interactivity on over 100M pixels of display
Tremendous system infrastructure using the SGI® NUMA scalable architecture:
- Up to 32 graphics pipes per system
- Up to 64 advanced MIPS® CPUs per system
- Up to 128GB of high-performance system memory
- Up to 64 PCI-X slots delivery unparalleled network and storage bandwidth
- Support for dozens of professional audio and video streams
- SGI® IRIX® 6.5.20 64-bit operating system with a heterogeneous SAN filesystem
- Larger systems possible through custom bids
And who won both the Constructors Championship and the Drivers Championship? Not BMW but Ferrari, for the third consecutive time.
So your point is?
I agree, I'm no fan of the latest-greatest upgrade-fanatic crowd and companies playing the same game.
In contrast the current major.minor relase of SGI's IRIX (6.5) will run on machines sailing by 12 years old (Indigo). Ditto for the latest quarterly release (6.5.20). To me this is pretty amazing considering that 6.5 was ready in about 1998 whilst the Indy and Indigo were new in 1993 and 1991 respectively, and both hit end of production before 1998. What's even more amazing is that new versions of IRIX run faster on old hardware than previous version. Combine this with SGIs commitment to continuously and carefully evolve their OS with a quarterly release scheme and still maintain huge backwards & platform compatibility, and you have one hell of a nice setup for hobbyists, students, and small businesses, or anyone in the market for a 2nd hand machine.
It would be great if other companies ditched their 'big bang,' redesign-everything, candy coated and bloated, useless bloody edge, never fix the bugs just get some new ones, jokey GUIs, and all that mess they call software design, and emulated SGI. I'm looking in your direction PTC.
Untrue. The speed limit is c.
Well as anyone who's been paying attention should know, SGI appears to be back on the ball. And they're comming up on releasing the R18K, which is supposed to be a massive jump. And their next-gen graphics are just around the corner. So wait and see but hopefully most of these complaints will be fixed shortly, except of course for the bitching about the price, SGIs will always be expensive.
These are the kinds of posts I like to read. Sweet, sweet first hand info.
It all comes back to your app(s). All this general talk is just chattering. SGI systems can be amazingly fast for some things, and disappointingly slow for others. Based on my experience I wouldn't buy a new Fuel for MCAD, unless perhaps I was working on a huge project and needed the 64-bit memory space (and even then I'd probably buy a HP zx6000). But I would buy as many Origin350s as I could afford for CFD.
SGI spun off the embeded/licensed stuff. They still retain their own design team and are still producing new workstation & server CPUs. MIPS lives on in embedded? Well yeah. They also live on as the heart of SGIs current main product line. And I believe MIPS switched to interlocked pipeline stages with the R4400. SGI MIPS cpus are on the bleeding edge of *manufacturing* techniques, more so than AMD or Intel. The latest chips (N0) are fabbed by NEC (Toshiba too?) on a 90nm ?8?-layer process with copper interconnects and so on. And SGI-NEC are blazing ahead to newer processes. The problem is that the chip design is lagging compared to the latest and greatest from Intel & AMD. They lost their focus, bet the farm on Itanium (which was years late), and played around with IA32 crap. Maybe if they hadn't followed this meandering course their MIPS cpus would still be on top of the charts. They're playing catch up now and it looks like they're doing a good job. Back on the ball as it were.
People I've talked to admit that their ranks have thinned but are quick to point out that SGI still has 1337 graphics d00dz. Not sure how to interpret that though.
I really hope so. SGI has let MIPS developement sort of lag. I'm sure it is all well and good for the big iron but a fast CPU would really give their desktop machines the needed kick in the ass.
Silicon Graphics Infinite Reality is basically a bunch of V12 Vpro graphic cards racked up with a compositor to coordinate them all.
e ch _info.html#2
Pretty impressive. And according to SGIs site they'll soon be releasing their next-gen graphics products, which are either really great, or just being over-hyped.
http://www.sgi.com/visualization/onyx/3000/ip/t
SGI sells mega-hardware (and buckets of support for it), IRIX isn't even a 'product' it is bundled with the hardware. Commodity shmodity. Their kit is what moves the business. Even their Linux stuff runs on whiz-bang gear. Their biggest threat isn't Linux per se, it's that filty cheap PCs are increasingly able to handle the same jobs as their mega-bucks systems.
Missing GHz? They stopped making these things in 1998.
... then they decide to dump money into the physics program instead of the Rochester Strong Medical Center.
real time on Silicon Graphics is much better than real time on any PC platform I've used (no such thing as guaranteed rate I/O on PCs yet?). However the PC is much much cheaper per unit of performance. I guess if you're clever enough to get what you want out of something cheap then hats off. Silicon Graphics is really the better/nicer/cooler/more elegant solution, iff you've got the money.
Why didn't they bother to throw SGI into the mix?
http://www.sgi.com/products/storage/
Why didn't they bother to throw SGI into the mix?
http://www.sgi.com/products/storage/
"Also they consume more power than an equivalent PC in most cases, cost more to upgrade if there even is an upgrade path... The only benefit of those machines is that you can sometimes get them for free."
... ever seen a 1500W 3-phase PSU? As per upgrade cost ... depends on where you buy parts. Most resellers are priced one or two orders of magnitude too high. I freuqently buy whole systems on eBay for very cheap, then swap components and resell to offset costs. The biggest problem is the limited upgradeability of the older systems.
..."
The Indy cosumes very little power (175W), especially with XL graphics. I'm unsure about the Indigo but I would be surprised if it sucked more power than a modern Athlon PC. The old 4Ds and the Challange/Onyx systems sure eat power though
"Linux doesn't support SGI machines very well because even today anything worth using is generally too expensive (or too large and power hungry which also comes down to expense) to bother with."
You can get a low spec second hand Octane for ~$200, but yes it does consume a lot of power. The best supported machine appears to be the Indy, which costs almost nothing and is a quiet little efficient pizza box.
"Also I think saying Linux will never run on MIPS like IRIX is probably deadly incorrect. When the MIPS-based SGIs (near all of them of course) come down to a more reasonable price and you can't walk down the sidewalk without tripping over an O2, by which time I fully expect Linux to have surpassed IRIX in all areas
We're already at that point. There has been massive dumping of Octane systems over the last year. Even O2s are dirt cheap. I think in SoCal systems fall out of the sky and pile up on curbs ; ) Show me LINUX running on an O2 doing gauranteed-rate I/O for on-air graphics or LINUX using ICE then maybe I'll change my tune.
"... it will also at least approach the support-level of IRIX for the most common SGI hardware."
If by support you mean access to bug-fixes, new feature support, and other types of help provided for free by the LINUX community then yes. SGI has never been very friendly to hobbiests/students but recently they've been shitting on such users.
"Right now, there's not enough interest in advancing the sgimips-specific code in Linux because the machines are not ubiquitous enough."
There has been a SGI supported porting effort going on for almost ?3? years. And on top of that SGI has been GPLing some of their goodies, XFS comes to mind. Not to mention all the work they've done on LINUX. Despite all that work LINUX is still not a practical OS on any SGI machine. We'll see what 3 more years does but by then who will want to use an Indigo or an Indy?
"I think it's safe to say it's going to outlast IRIX and possibly SGI. So if it happens soon enough, IRIX may actually end up with WORSE support for interesting sgimips systems like indigo R4000, O2, and indy systems at the very least, and (As we are seeing) some of the relative "big iron"."
Possibly. Last I knew SGI had commited to providing IRIX/MIPS support till the end of the decade. The Indigo, Indy, Indigo2, and older systems are already End-of-Life (EOL) by SGI. Current IRIX releases still support these old systems but there is no gaurantee that this will continue. Someday IRIX 6.X or 7.X etc. will not support these machines. So I guess the benchmark for LINUX on these older systems is IRIX 6.5.
"So far SGI and IBM have both brought out powerhouse systems which run linux. I doubt this trend will change, except to speed up... "
Because it saves them money, it's is not necessarily the most elegant solution. SGI could not afford to port IRIX to IA/64. One of the sad things history proves is that long-term the best seldom wins, mediocrity flourishes.
"Nobody ever installs IRIX on low end PC hardware" because ... YOU CAN'T!
... IRIX is superb. I have an Indigo Elan running 6.5.17 and it's is more pleasant to use than my Windows PC.
... compared to LINUX"
"IRIX runs kinda slow on low end machines" != true
My Indy shipped with IRIX 5.3 back in 1996. Since then I've added more RAM and got a bigger disk. Now it runs 6.5.13. The only thing slow about this machine today is the old CPU and the old graphics
The downside of course is that these ~10 year old machines are slow when running first-class modern software (Maya, Pro/E, ANSYS, etc.) Though they are certainly fast enough for use as a basic desktop system (web/email, mp3, word-processing, etc.).
"
Last I checked LINUX on MIPS (which only supported R4K Indigo & Indy with Entry/Newport graphics AFAIK) didn't even support a frame buffer, let alone the various video options, 3d graphics boards, and other multi-media goodies. Why bother with LINUX when it doesn't support any of the features that make an SGI an SGI? Besides LINUX will never run on MIPS like IRIX.
It has hardware cache coherence, though I can't find a doc which proclaims this. Give SGI a call, I'm sure a sales-droid can confirm this and an engineer can elaborate. Their old systems (Origin2000) were ccNUMA as are the Origin3000 systems. Read John Mashey's NUMAflex Essay for more info on Origin/ccNUMA/NUMAflex.
I believe MIPS is also an open architecture, so if that's important consider buying an SGI Origin.
Backplanes are so 1994.
NUMA == Non-Uniform Memory Access. There is still *one* kernel, cache coherency, and a shared memory space. Of course you can partition a system if you like.
Read Mr. Mashey's excellent NUMAflex paper.
You don't *have* to rewrite anything. This is why SGI stills sells development workstations. You can compile on an Octane and then run on an Origin.
Wonder if we'll see any IA-64 workstation products from SGI or will HP be the only game in town.
Lastly, most SGI customers develop their own software so the 3rd-party is usually irrelevant.
"I'm afraid of these sudden changes in the direction of, let's face it, trendy technologies. Linux still has to prove itslef in systems with many CPUs."
This is not so sudden, they've been planning such a change for many years. Some of their delays have been tied to Intel's delays. SGI has had large development systems based on Itanium for a long time. And they've been trying to improve Linux (with some resistance) for some time.
"There really isn't any reason to chose Linux over IRIX, performance-wise."
Except that SGI has tied Linux to IA-64 at a certain price point. If you want a large SGI IA-64 system then you're stuck with Linux. If you need IRIX &/or > 64 CPUs in a single image system then you should buy an Origin.
It was determined a long time ago that porting IRIX was way too costly and complicated.