10 ms·

> Originally released in 1993, the Onyx from SiliconGraphics was an absolute powerhouse. The machines were powered by between one and four MIPS processors (orig

• bluedino 5y ago
  > 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era. To be fair I don't think the 200MHz chips came out until 1995, when you could also get a Pentium Pro in similar speeds.
  • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
    I miss my W6-LI "Lightning" dual PPro board. Spec built that system with all SCSI internals for $5200 in about '95 (with just a single 180MHz PPro, upgraded later to dual)
• slightwinder 5y ago
  > 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era. More precisely, it was the start of the Pentium era. The First Pentiums with 60/66 MHz were released in March 1993. But interesting enough, it seems the R4400 were already 64-bit.
  • theodric 5y ago
    My Indigo 2 R4400SC couldn't run 64-bit IRIX. For that I had to swap the motherboard and CPU for an R10000.
  • aledalgrande 5y ago
    I remember my friend buying one of the first Pentium desktops and plugging in the Carmageddon demo... WOW Before that I had only used 286, 486 and 586.
  • throwawaylinux 5y ago
    The 250MHz R4400 wasn't released in 1993 though. It (the NEC one) sampled in mid '95 on a 0.35 micron process, and the RISCstation 2250 that it shipped in was announced in December '95. The Pentium Pro was available at 180MHz at about the same time and soon reached 200MHz. The EV5 reached around 500MHz in '96 though! The high end RISCs really did blow the doors off everything back then. The Pentium Pro was the beginning of the end for them though.
• downrightmike 5y ago
  I just wish they would find a better port to remaster, the current one is a low resolution mess and looks far worse on PS4 than the original on PS1 because it was a bad PC port back in the day and were the only files they could find.
  • louhike 5y ago
    Unfortunately they lost all the files of the original game, so they can only: - Use the PC port - Emulate the PS1 game - Rebuild it (which will take a lot of time and resources)
    • colordrops 5y ago
      > Unfortunately they lost all the files of the original game I'm always flabbergasted when I hear of something like this. Such as NASA losing many videos of the moon landing. How does that happen?! Could the existing copies of the game out there be reverse engineered?
      • johnnyanmac 5y ago
        > How does that happen?! to be frank, carelessness. in the sympathetic sense, this was decades ago, wear and tear happens, and coporate orgs are messy. When Squaresoft merged with Enix, there was inevitably going to have some stuff, important stuff even, lost in the move. Even if they were perfectly careful to keep things archived. But From their own mouth, it was just a different time where archiving wasn't important: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/square-enix-digital-preservation-plans-slowed-by-lost-code https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/square-enix-digital-preserv... > The concept of games preservation is a relatively recent one, and as Matsuda admits: "It's very hard to find them sometimes, because back in the day you just made them and put them out there and you were done – you didn't think of how you were going to sell them down the road. Sometimes customers ask, 'Why haven't you released that [game] yet?' And the truth of the matter is it's because we don't know where it has gone." The 80's was just a small wing of developers trying to put out a toy. They weren't thinking of the original Final Fantasy as the Sistene Chapel of gaming. They thought as much about preserving it as I did about preserving that game jam game I made almost a decade ago. If it wasn't as easy for me to preserve it as throwing it on dropbox, I probably woulda lost my source code too. >Could the existing copies of the game out there be reverse engineered? It's physically possible. But the effort to extract assets, scene data, and source code and re-configure that into a clean port is much more gargantuan than using the source from "a bad port" and working from there. Even if they did manage to do that, that's another thing about video game code that's only now starting to be less true; it's an utter mess of spaghetti code. Games weren't made to be maintained for years by a revolving door of developers like a website, and few people will ever see the code. They get something working, and leave it there as long as its not bothering anyone. coding standards were very loose I'm sure many small intricacies people come to appreciate were merely products of rushed development at the 11th hour, with non-important bugs that just stayed in the final product. Even if they preserved the code, those imperfections fans appreciate would likely be patched out anyways (See: Backwards long jump in Super Mario 64 being removed in subsequent releases).
• qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Their price reflected their capabilities. I think they were something like $20k on the low end. A nice new car in 1993 was maybe $10k. Lots of homes even in good cities sold for $20k. edit: Wow these were actually $100-250k! Back in 1993 that was an immense amount of money. I bet you could have bought a nice San Francisco row house in the mission or other hot area for $100k back then.
  • brailsafe 5y ago
    must be nice to have made a 30x return on your house in 30 years
    • qbasic_forever 5y ago
      The real winners are the boomer generation. When they graduated college in the mid 60's wages were enormous relative to the cost of property. Property in all the now hotly competitive areas was dirt cheap too. If you bought in SF back then you've probably made 100x or more on the property value.
      • elihu 5y ago
        There's an interesting theory I came across that a lot of the cheap housing of that era was due to the interstate highway system, built partly during WWII. A lot of land that before was too far from cities for people to commute suddenly became in reach of people with decent cars. So that meant there was a whole lot of usable real-estate that hadn't already been built on, and that meant cheap land for about a generation. If that's true, maybe we're approaching another phase of that, where people move away from cities because they can work remote. And things like Starlink might make some places tolerable to work from that wouldn't be before. On the other hand, even rural property is expensive in a lot of places now. Nowhere is immune to real estate speculation.
        • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
          > On the other hand, even rural property is expensive in a lot of places now. Nowhere is immune to real estate speculation. That's it, location is becoming less of a factor to determine housing prices. That said, besides internet you still need good access to things like plumbing and electricity, social aspects, and of course the climate has to be liveable; I can't imagine what it's like since I live in a very moderate climate country (western Europe), but stuff is a lot more extreme in the US, and the actual amount of liveable space is limited.
• p_l 5y ago
  Another cpu with similar clock of that era was Alpha, whose first real supplies were 150MHz, quickly updated to 200MHz
• sandos 5y ago
  I once worked on a military simulator, and it ran on very similar hardware, it might even have been the onyx. Actually yes I do believe thats it now that I've googled it! I worked on this in 2011-12, and I can tell you compiling stuff was not fast! It was kind of funny thinking that this had once been a "supercomputer"... now it was slower than even old desktops!
• jiggawatts 5y ago
  > a 37 Ghz CPU with 16 TB of RAM now. Something common in the hypervisor admin space is expressing the compute capacity by multiplying the core count with the clock speed. So for example a 64 core EPYC at 2.5GHz is written down in documentation as a 160 GHz processor. So these Onyx desktops are directly comparable to artists using a high-end Mac Pro or Threadripper workstation.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    OTOH, those machines were already quad processors (at the high end). And I don't know if you can feasibly have 16TB of RAM in a single compute node. In that case you'd need a rack-scale multi-node system like the gear the Oxide folks are pushing for "hyperscaler" workloads. (My guess is that such a thing could be made useful to a single user - along the lines of Alan Kay's quote referenced in a sibling comment - but it would likely need to be something that involves chewing through humongous amounts of data, to really make use of that scale. Not sure if the art-creation use case has any real need for that nowadays. Some sort of compute-heavy data analytics for decision support and the like would be a lot closer to the mark.)
    • jiggawatts 5y ago
      You can have NVMe disk arrays that are faster than the main memory speed of even quite recent desktop PCs these days for reasonable money. My laptop can do 7 GB/s from one drive. I've seen demos of 30GB/s by simply using a 4-port PCIe x16 adapter card. There isn't even a need to venture into exotic technologies like NVRAM DIMMs..
  • tomxor 5y ago
    If you want to use that metric then the Onyx would be: 4x 250MHz R4400s + 12x 40MHz Intel i860s = 1480 MHz when maxed out. But clock speed is a very poor metric for comparing older CPUs. The size of these CPUs were much smaller, the number of instructions they could cram into each clock cycle and complexity of those instructions was no doubt far lower, and the variety of instructions and ability to specialise far lower (i'm not even considering the whole RISC and MIPS thing, just the fact that they are working with much smaller dies and far fewer, larger gates)... instructions per second might be a better comparison, but then you still lack that qualitative difference in the variety of instruction as i said.
• anyfoo 5y ago
  > Having those specs then would be like running a 37 Ghz CPU with 16 TB of RAM now. More, much more. We've long hit a point of diminishing returns for a lot of standard consumer workflows. More CPU and RAM helps mainly for "specialist" workflows (including software engineering) and can be really nice, but computers have overall been "fast" for a while now. Back then you could notice an increase in CPU frequency or cache in almost everything you do, even if it was just writing a letter. And more RAM allowed you to do things that were virtually[1] impossible before. Especially because there were no SSDs: You paid dearly for anything that could not be kept ready in your puny RAM. [1] Pun sort of intended: Virtual memory might technically allow you to do those things anyway, but often the performance cost was so high that it was no fun, if not pointless. But we're also talking of the DOS/Win 3.x/DOS extender days, where virtual memory was technically possible, but definitely not ubiquitous.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    A 33MHz 486 was not even "standard consumer gear" in 1993 - it was a costly, business oriented machine that could cost as much as a high-end Mac Pro in 2022 (after controlling for inflation). Standard consumer prices would have gotten you a home-computer class machine like the Atari ST, that was pushing a handful of MHz. Go even cheaper and you would've had to make do with a 8-bit home computer, like the C128 - little more than a glorified desk calculator. There's not even a loose equivalent to that class of machines today, aside from deep embedded stuff that a consumer will never have reason to touch.
    • anyfoo 5y ago
      Yes, and even with that "upper class" PC for business, upgrading CPU and RAM in small steps always gave you a massive gain and new possibilities, and you could keep doing that for a long long time. I'm not sure younger people who essentially grew up with supercomputers in their pocket can really feel what that meant. (No shade meant at all. I, in turn, grew up with many other things taken for granted the same way, before.)
    • girvo 5y ago
      Our 100Mhz Pentium 1 IBM desktop in 1995 was pretty awesome compared to my friends computers (if they even had one) at the time.
• rbanffy 5y ago
  > 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era. I think the 250 MHz ones appeared later on, in subsequent revisions. Still, one of the promises of RISC was that, since the logic was much simpler, you could jack up clock rates further than it was possible with CISC designs.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    Much the same promise is made by VLIW today - it should let you "jack up" core counts and clock rates compared to even RISC, because you don't need to do energy-intensive OOO reordering and speculation so it becomes feasible to avoid thermal and power constraints even with otherwise heavy CPU use. (The clearest issue with it is that it leaks way too much of your μarch choices in the programming model, so every ISA is inherently bespoke.)
• wang_li 5y ago
  Or another way to consider it is my 2021 era $399 Jetson Xavier NX dev kit is a better computer in every way an Onyx. Other than my Jetson Nano only having 4 GB of RAM, it's also a more capable computer than an Onyx. Hooray for Moore's law and mass production.
• msikora 5y ago
  I got my first PC in 1993 - 386 40 MHz, 4 MB RAM, 80 MB HDD :)
• ummonk 5y ago
  Yes that would have been extremely impressive in the early 2000s, nevermind the mid 90s.
• roel_v 5y ago
  I once (2001) almost bought an Onyx at an auction where the ill-gotten stock (rather, what was left of it) of a con man who had managed to swindle a lot of computer companies out of all sorts of gear was sold. Apparently, this guy had dressed up as an Army general, gone to all sorts of companies in the first dot com boom, and gotten them to deliver all sorts of 'samples' to a fake dropoff point which he then sold on. It was a massive auction, ranging from pallets full of backup tapes to stuff like this fridge size Onyx (looking at the Onyx wikipedia page, maybe it was actually two Onyx's in a rack, like the image for Onyx 2? Or maybe it actually was an Onyx 2? I didn't know anything about theses things, just that they looked cool, and they were legendary among us first wave Linux adopters, which most 'real Unix' folk at the time still looked down on). Anyway there was so much stuff to be sold, that the normal auction house didn't have enough storage, so they had to move to an actual (disused) pig sty in the same village. Complete with smell from the remaining functioning animal stables on the rest of the farm (which was still an actual functioning farm). Most of the stuff sold quite quickly, then when the Onyx went up, nobody wanted to bid. Everybody was sort of looking at each other with shifty eyes, waiting for someone else to make a move. As mentioned I didn't know anything about IRIX or any non-free Unix basically, nor did I have money or a place to put such a machine, but I just shouted out '250 euros!' and the auctioneer looked relieved that at least someone was going to take this thing off his hands. Then some other people started bidding, I got over excited and bid along up to a thousand euros or so and then I came to my senses and gave up. IIRC it eventually went for a few thousand. That auction hall looked like a 'revenge of the nerds' casting call. Good times.
• _the_inflator 5y ago
  And the RAM was insanely expensive. I remember some senior managers from IBM at the time, who had 128MB powered Workstations using Windows NT. They did not brag about the machines, they simply stated the fact, that this was some engineering master piece. That much RAM itself posed some problems, because Windows NT was still new, hardly any software ran on it and also that "much" RAM was new, so what to do about it? Virtual Hard Disc? For example, Windows 95 could only address 64 mb without slowing down.
• rasz 5y ago
  >250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era March 1994 was both 486 DX4 100MHz and Pentium 100 R4400 wiki: "In mid-1995, a 250 MHz part began sampling." Pentium 200 came out in June 1996. So ~one year clock wise, probably two-three years for performance (1998 >400MHz Pentium 2).