Any SGI fans?

[Iggy]

Neat!
That is an architecture I've always wanted to explore.

[Iggy]

Iggy it's definitely worth taking a look at. If you want to get a nice and cheap one look for an SGI O2 or an Octane off ebay or nekochan.net

Thanks, I'll take a look.
It would go nicely with my Sun hardware.
I like Unix, Unix derivatives, and RISC processors.
And MIPS is an ISA I have not examined.

[Iggy]

I just looked up the specs on the SGI Fuel.
Man, you have one seriously nice workstation.
Wish I could find one.
If this is a low to mid end product, what other MIPS based devices did SGI offer at the end of their MIPS production?

[Iggy]

Jeff,

It won't smoke at all, You may have issues with the picture coming in on some monitors but most monitors support the sync on green protocol it uses.

Iggy,

Onyx 350s are rack mount and on the high end of it, they have up to 1ghz quad cores. Same for the Tezro. If you have the space there are the Origin and Onyx 3000s, bigger than a fridge. Those are clusters. Also most SGIs have craylink which allows you cluster them with a low latency, 3.2 gigabit connection. If you cluster a few SGI Onyx , Octanes or other high end ones you can have a monster of a machine.

If anyone wants one I have one I don't mind selling, but its heavy as hell so shipping is not a good idea.

Where are you?
Sounds like they are RISC dream machines.

[Iggy]

Iggy,

I live outside of DC in the Northern Virginia area.

I've a Personal Iris 4D/35+ in storage with a friend,that's the one I was looking to sell. It has 64mb RAM, a 676mb SCSI drive and I have a nice keyboard and optical mouse for it. Its about on par with a 486 at 66mhz from what I have seen.

The 35 MHz  model.
Interesting.
PM me a price.

BTW - What would that run? IRIX 5.2?

[Iggy]

Makes me wonder how MIPS processors (like the Loongson) compare to modern PPCs in DMIPS.

[Iggy]

Couldn't get to the Loongson benchmarks.
And the seller that was offering an Octane 2 system just canceled all bids.
Frankly, I'd like a MIPS  machine, but I'm going to have to consider this carefully.

SGI hardware runs IRIX, which looks nice.
While the Loongson hardware runs YALD.

[Iggy]

Iggy,

For regular desktop use a Fuel can't be beat in brawn to price ratio. That's why I got my sexy redhead.

Believe me, I looked for one.
Most appear to still be in use.
Until recently, SGI was still offering refurbished units (which says something about the MIPS/IRIX combination).

[Iggy]

What's your budget on an SGI I'll ask around.

Good question.
When I was looking at 250-400MHz machines the $250 to $400 price range seemed reasonable.
But higher end machines are faster and can handle more processors.
The Fuel can handle up to four, can't it?
I am seriously thinking about a larger investment.

How much would you suggest (before it gets silly and I might as well go multi-core X86)?

[Iggy]

Ordered a PIC32MZ based mcu controller board in order to play with a low end 200MHz MIPS based mcu.
These things look SO much more capable than most other MCUs.
Probably much more powerful than comparably clocked Coldfire or ARM based mcus.

I wonder how well they would work in a cluster.

[Iggy]

Not MIPS based, but still impressive.
SGI super computer with 72 Itanium processors and 312GBs of DDR2 ram listed on eBay for under $2000.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=301207367745

[Iggy]

@Iggy

The Itanium processor was an epic fail, that's why it's only $2,000.

That would be a matter of opinion.
Personally, I thought the Pentium IV was a far bigger embarrassment to Intel.
The last Itanium models were introduced in 2012, and per MHz they still outperform X86 cpus.
This system is a bargain.
If I had a spare two grand, I'd snap it up and use it as a we server.

[Iggy]

@Iggy

For Video Editing I'm sticking with Xenon.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon


@MiAmigo

Very cool.

Did I mention video?
For that I'm using a lowly quad core AMD system (although I have considered an i5).
The SGI system would make a very capable server.

[Iggy]

@Iggy

Cool. what video editing app are you using?

Nothing that good.
Right now, I have been focusing on decrypting, and resizing/re-encoding software.
Since I used to edit 16mm film, I would like to get some decent software for editing HD video (other than the cheap stuff I have on hand), but I am not sure when I would get a chance to use it.

Any recommendations?
You have a lot more experience with digital video editing than I do.

[Iggy]

Yes, I am a huge fan, both figuratively, and literally speaking. While I was building my Beowulf Plateau (http://contest.techbriefs.com/2013/entries/electronics/4254), I also acquired and restored an SGI Altix 3700 to working order. As this is a truly monstrous beast, I had to have my entire workshop rewired to feed it power. (I installed 2 220v outlets.) Currently I'm replacing one of the R-Bricks and rigging it up to output video directly to a monitor instead of just accessing it by way of dumb terminal.)

Unfortunately, the Altix system listed on eBay does not come with an OS.
While SUSE Enterprise Linux is still available for it, the license price is prohibitively high.
And support under BSD has serious limitations.
Are there any other Linux ports available for these systems?