Must be old but it makes it sound cool.

Chips by themselves dont do much, a good or mad motherboard/memory path can make or ruin a computer.

Stonent I notice you have an SGI in your sig, what do you think of those systems? I was thinking about adding a SGI box to my collection since they seem cheap at the moment.

It's a lot like seeing old ads in Byte for 20MB Seagate hard disks at over $200.00

emaq123

quote:

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Product annoucments for old tech that was cutting edge at the time are always funny when you read them later.

It's a lot like seeing old ads in Byte for 20MB Seagate hard disks at over $200.00

emaq123

SE/30 and system 6.0.8 Now we're talking POWER!

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"**** em" - Jobs in regards to customers
Warrior maclover5
68kMLA
Official 68kMLA Detective
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Yeah I like my Indy, getting Irix for it is a bit of a headache but you can put Debian on it as there is a SGI distro. Check out the forums at http://www.nekochan.net they are kinda like the SGI version of this forum.

I've only got an 8 bit video card in it so surfing and trying to view 3D stuff is ugly. I want a 24bit card or maybe a 3D board for it. Some say the 24 bit card with the R5000 is faster than the 3D board with the R5000. I don't know, just whatever I can get my hands on...

There you can see a Newport-8 (aka 8bit XL) video card. The 24 bit version has the extra ram pads filled and more chips on the bottom.

The indy's take standard 50 pin scsi drives and standard 72 pin Parity ram so they are one of the more cost effective models. The Indigo2 can also take 72 pin ram and has EISA slots along with GIO64 slots. (Similar to the extra VL Bus connector on old 486 boards) You can put a 3com 3c597 Network card in an Indigo2 for 100mbit support.

There are 2 versions of the Indigo2, Teal and Purple. The Teal models are older and go up to an R5000. The Purple models have an extra beefy power supply and a power bus between the EISA and GIO64 slots that allows you to use Impact video cards that require more juice. They can take up to an R10000 processor.

When shopping for an SGI, note that the processors are referred to RxxxxPC or RxxxxSC. PC means that there is no L2 cache and SC means that there is. (Primary Cache, Secondary Cache) the picture above shows a PC processor module. The Cache chips sit next to the CPU on the module, so it is easy to tell the difference.

I found this little bit of performance data on google groups:

 
        prim.cache sec.cache SpecInt92 Specfp92 Xlines/sec 3D polys/sec
R4600PC+  16K/16K     0         63        50       1.4M        33K
R4000SC+   8K/8K     1M         57        63       1.4M        40K
R4400SC*  16K/16K    1M         88        96       1.6M        70K
+ (100 Mhz)   * (150 Mhz)
The R4600PC almost manages to keep up with the older R4000SC, even 
though it has no secondary cache, because it has double the instruction
/data caches.  Floating point performance of the R4000SC is about 
halfway between the other two, depending on the problem and how it 
fits into the caches.  Upgrading any old R4000PC's to R4000SC's is a 
good deal.

So the R4400 is the better of the 3. And finally the best processor for the Indy is the R5000. Comparing the R5000 to the R4400 would be like comparing G4 to G3 on a Mac. But it is slightly limited in its implementation in the Indy. It is a full 64bit processor but the Indy itself is limited by its 32 bit internal bus. (Like the older Macs with 32bit vs 24bit bus adressing)

So it can't run 64bit only binaries.

The speed is pretty good as long as your not trying to run 3D with a textures. It is a lot more responsive than a similarly configured PC, or Sparc.

SGI Challenge series systems are servers which are made out of desktop systems. They usually remove the video card and put a Ultra Wide Scsi card there instead.

Indy > Challenege S
Indigo2 > Challenge M
(I dunno the rest)

My Indy Specs:

CPU: MIPS R5000 Processor Chip Revision: 1.0
FPU: MIPS R5000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 1.0
1 150 MHZ IP22 Processor
Main memory size: 128 Mbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 512 Kbytes on Processor 0
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision D
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0 (unit 1)
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board bi-directional parallel port
Graphics board: Indy 8-bit
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Integral ISDN: Basic Rate Interface unit 0, revision 1.0
Iris Audio Processor: version A2 revision 4.1.0
Vino video: unit 0, revision 0, IndyCam not connected

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