Question: SGI

unlearnthetruth

unlearnthetruth

Recycle Me!
I was hanging around SGI's website, and read the description about how they're systems are all powered to do complex tasks yadda yadda yadda. I looked at the specs and stuff, and it doesn't seem to me to be anything special... I was wondering exactly what it is that makes these things so spectacular? Anyone wanna educate me? :D
 
It's all about the way the software is written, and how the hardware talks to itself.

For example (just throwing out numbers here, nothing official) the speed by which a 1k instruction passes from the CPU to the video card and back on a mac is say 10ms over a cache of 133MHz. On a SGI that speed is 5ms over a 266Mhz cache. But that's only one way to do it, and that may not be how SGI did it. (It would run hotter than you'd care to know)

The other much more efficent way is to tell the CPU to do things in a different manner. i.e. Don't make a complicated GUI for me, just connect coordinates 129,118,558,199 and shade them. Don't worry about anything else. So now you've got a computer that is using maybe 5% of it's CPU for gui, and has 95% left for the program's processes.

Now this could be all wrong, but it's how it was explained to me when I was working on O2's w/ 300 something MHz chips, and 128MB of ram.

Btw, you want to talk about f-a-s-t OpenGL rendering! Quake ran on that thing 1024x768 without a stutter. My PC of PII status w/ 256MB and a voodoo card w/ 4MB could barely handle 800x600. It's all about how the software talks to the hardware. ;)
 
A couple more things about SGI (which is a big part of my bread and butter right now).

twyg is right on about the dev tools, especially for 3D. Remember, these are the folks who brought us OpenGL.

The other big thing about SGI hardware is the ridiculous amount of main bus bandwidth. SGI bought out Cray, and with it got thier Unified Memory Architecture, which translates to wicked fast bus interrconnect. A new Octane2 pushes 1.6 GB/sec (that's _bytes_ not bits) through the motherboard (the memory alone will sustain 1.0GB/sec)... that's just sick.

The other thing to note about SGI hardware is the kick-ass 3D video hardware... hell, on the Octane2, the video board is water cooled... I said WATER COOLED people!!

What I always tell people around here when we look at macs vs NT vs SGI: SGIs have terrible bang for the buck, but they give you more total bang than anything else (at least in their niche product space)

Hope that sheds some light...

-alex.
 
Asked by Nummi_G4
I thought SGIs ran NT ????
Click to expand...

They tried making some Intel based systems that ran Windows NT and Linux, but they sold that part off to Intergraph. They made the first Itanium workstation (running Linux), but they have dropped Windows completely.

Remember that these are not PCs, and the standard are not the same (we as Mac users should be the last to point fingers and say something doesn't measure up). I've been using SGIs for more than 10 years, and for what they do, they are the best. Probably why I own three myself.
 
Just to expand slightly on RacerX's comment:

Aside from the discontinued Visual Workstation series, which was Intel based and ran NT or Linux, SGI boxes are based on the MIPS processor line (a true RISC processor) and run IRIX, SGI's System V flavor of UNIX.

L8r,
-alex.

PS: RacerX: I have three SGI's at home too! I cut my UNIX teeth on the Indy that is now my mail server...
 
...And even then, might as well have no root password... the thing's one big security hole.

I've said it a million times, IRIX is the best desktop UNIX around (or was until OSX) and it can shovel more data than a politician shovels horse puckey, but security? What's that?

-alex.
 
ok, since I haven't red it in any other post, maybe one of the most important things wasn't mentioned (IMHO): it's a 64 bit architecture, which means the processor can work on up to 64 bit words in one cycle.

...and mine still hasn't arrived :(
 
I;ve always drooled about SGI machines ;)
I even suggested to my X that she do a report on it (when she was picking topics :p).

Imagine the emulation ability of an octane....heck that baby could run winblows fast as fast as an F1 racer hehehehe ;)


Admiral
 
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