4 ms·

Yeah, I was a bit surprised reading this, myself. $500k for a Y-MP does seem like a nice price - I assume they were getting a machine that had been previously

Yeah, I was a bit surprised reading this, myself. $500k for a Y-MP does seem like a nice price - I assume they were getting a machine that had been previously loaned to someone who was upgrading to something massively multiprocessor. But it seems like the SGI Challenge architecture makes more sense in 1995. An Onyx would be half the price of that Y-MP, with superior graphics. A Power Challenge GR would as performant as the Y-MP, again with superior graphics, though I suspect about the same price. And anything from SGI has better OS and development tools than UNICOS did at the time. Plus they're easier to install, power and cool. I suspect that moving over to Win32 probably conferred a lot of advantages, developing on the same system that is your target market. I wonder if they would have ultimately done that even if the Cray deal was on the table.

jwr 9y ago
> An Onyx would be half the price of that Y-MP, with superior graphics. As someone who used both: it also would be a massive downgrade in terms of reliability and system stability. The Onyx I had access to had regular problems with various system hangs and lockups.
- ethomson 9y ago
  Interesting. I'm sorry to hear that; I actually never used an Onyx but I went from a Cray 2 to a Cray X-MP to a Power Challenge. I was skeptical about Irix and the Challenge, mostly because a bunch of consumer-ish processors seemed like a downgrade, but it turned out to be both fast and rock solid for my workload. That said, I was a consumer, not an administrator, so it's very possible that our admins kept the reliability issues from affecting me.