5 ms·

IMHO 'the newer Suns' (as in the pizza box things that are now 2 decades old) always felt slow compared to other boxes I was using at the time. The OpenLook win

IMHO 'the newer Suns' (as in the pizza box things that are now 2 decades old) always felt slow compared to other boxes I was using at the time. The OpenLook window manager was also a bit naff compared to what else was going. I preferred Silicon Graphics hardware back then, the user interface was as cool and responsive as it gets rather than the juddery OpenLook effort the Sun machines had. I stayed working with SGI machines when the PC's started to get really fast - Ghz clock speeds rather than the few hundred Mhz that RISC machines did back then. I felt RISC should have the higher clock speed, but it wasn't to be and SGI and other workstations died a death shortly thereafter. During those end times I spke to some SGI engineer who tried to persuade me that it really wasn't about clock speed, which was true on SGI as there was a lot you could do in the many hardware boards a typical SGI machine came with. For most actual real work the graphics pipeline would be maxed out with the CPUs (of which there could be many) doing very little. So my Raspberry Pi vs... would be Raspberry Pi vs SGI Onyx 'Infinite Reality' desk-side super-computer from some time in the mid 1990's. These usually cost real money and were tricked out - I had one with 256Mb of RAM and 64Mb of graphics RAM. Nobody had that much memory back then!!! Yet would anyone want the 256Mb PI when there is the 512 Mb version?

nickpsecurity 11y ago
"I preferred Silicon Graphics hardware back then, the user interface was as cool and responsive as it gets rather than the juddery OpenLook effort the Sun machines had." Bro, Silicon Graphics was the shit! I was studying games, AI, and supercomputing back then. Their Octane workstations with dual 200MHz MIPS plus innovative graphics were totally smoking nearly GHz Intel rigs. The NUMAlinks on Origin were giving 100+GB of RAM, dozens of CPU's, and GB/s bandwidth at microsecond latencies. They threw a room full of Onyx2 NUMA's together to blow our minds with [the graphics of] Final Fantasy. They later put FPGA's ("RASC") on NUMAlink in Altix machines to show what FPGA's could really do as accelerators if PCI bottleneck wasn't there. Anything those people did was mind-blowing for a time. Their legacy lives on in XFS, the NUMA extensions to Linux, that mainstream graphics adopted similar interconnect strategy, and that Intel's about to one-up their FPGA scheme with Altera acquisition. Not a bad list. I want them to spin off an older NUMAlink chip as a commodity for building x86 NUMA's. I still want me a MPP system with single-system image and hundreds of GB RAM on the cheap. It's 2015 but my 1990's dream still hasn't come true. Getting closer. "InfiniteReality" You mean this bad boy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z45nbzMLk98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z45nbzMLk98 Btw, here's the two architectures they used if you were interested in technical aspects. It's so out of date that a FOSS GPU should be able to copy it with low patent risk. Improving it would make a nice MS or PhD for academics. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15869-f11/www/readings/kilgard97_realizinggl.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15869-f... "Yet would anyone want the 256Mb PI when there is the 512 Mb version?" Based on what I've read, anyone trying to give them muscle should go for 512MB as the 256MB is giving many commenters hell. Just too little memory. However, people doing things that aren't memory intensively, esp embedded, might be fine with a fraction of Pi's resources. Remember that even 8-bit CPU's still sell around $10 billion a year at prices under a few bucks each. That's a lot of applications and units. Meanwhile, anyone wanting an SGI-style experience today will need a combo of high-end CPU's, GPU's, and FPGA's. Pico Computing's desktops seem to fit the bill. I'm saving up for one. :) http://picocomputing.com/products/picocube/picomini/ http://picocomputing.com/products/picocube/picomini/ http://picocomputing.com/products/hpc-systems/sc6-4u/ http://picocomputing.com/products/hpc-systems/sc6-4u/

nickpsecurity 11y ago

"I preferred Silicon Graphics hardware back then, the user interface was as cool and responsive as it gets rather than the juddery OpenLook effort the Sun machines had." Bro, Silicon Graphics was the shit! I was studying games, AI, and supercomputing back then. Their Octane workstations with dual 200MHz MIPS plus innovative graphics were totally smoking nearly GHz Intel rigs. The NUMAlinks on Origin were giving 100+GB of RAM, dozens of CPU's, and GB/s bandwidth at microsecond latencies. They threw a room full of Onyx2 NUMA's together to blow our minds with [the graphics of] Final Fantasy. They later put FPGA's ("RASC") on NUMAlink in Altix machines to show what FPGA's could really do as accelerators if PCI bottleneck wasn't there. Anything those people did was mind-blowing for a time. Their legacy lives on in XFS, the NUMA extensions to Linux, that mainstream graphics adopted similar interconnect strategy, and that Intel's about to one-up their FPGA scheme with Altera acquisition. Not a bad list. I want them to spin off an older NUMAlink chip as a commodity for building x86 NUMA's. I still want me a MPP system with single-system image and hundreds of GB RAM on the cheap. It's 2015 but my 1990's dream still hasn't come true. Getting closer. "InfiniteReality" You mean this bad boy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z45nbzMLk98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z45nbzMLk98 Btw, here's the two architectures they used if you were interested in technical aspects. It's so out of date that a FOSS GPU should be able to copy it with low patent risk. Improving it would make a nice MS or PhD for academics. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15869-f11/www/readings/kilgard97_realizinggl.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15869-f... "Yet would anyone want the 256Mb PI when there is the 512 Mb version?" Based on what I've read, anyone trying to give them muscle should go for 512MB as the 256MB is giving many commenters hell. Just too little memory. However, people doing things that aren't memory intensively, esp embedded, might be fine with a fraction of Pi's resources. Remember that even 8-bit CPU's still sell around $10 billion a year at prices under a few bucks each. That's a lot of applications and units. Meanwhile, anyone wanting an SGI-style experience today will need a combo of high-end CPU's, GPU's, and FPGA's. Pico Computing's desktops seem to fit the bill. I'm saving up for one. :) http://picocomputing.com/products/picocube/picomini/ http://picocomputing.com/products/picocube/picomini/ http://picocomputing.com/products/hpc-systems/sc6-4u/ http://picocomputing.com/products/hpc-systems/sc6-4u/