SGI Octane
==========
This evening I decided to fire up my Silicon Graphics Octane
workstation [1]. It's big, noisy but cool:
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2 400 MHZ IP30 Processors
CPU: MIPS R12000 Processor Chip Revision: 3.5
FPU: MIPS R12010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 0.0
Main memory size: 2048 Mbytes
Xbow ASIC: Revision 1.3
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 2 Mbytes
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended
IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty1
IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty2
IOC3 parallel port: plp1
Graphics board: SI
Integral Fast Ethernet: ef0, version 1, pci 2
Iris Audio Processor: version RAD revision 12.0, number 1
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So, it's relatively powerful (two 400 MHz MIPS CPUs) but has very basic
graphics board (the SI - SolidImpact, which is basically the one like
the SolidImpact in the older Indigo2). There are faster CPUs available
(600 MHz) and memory can be doubled (maximus is 4 GB) but the main
limitation is the SI board. NOt only can do inly 1280x1024 (which is
actually OK for me because my LCD is exactly 1280x1024) but it has also
no texture memory. This is cruel because the BZflag looks so ugly
without textures (I tested it and performance is not better than on a
SGI Indigo2 with its single R4400 CPU @250 MHz - it's thow generation
older CPU).
Except this the system is pretty fast, even the Firefox can run on
acceptable speed here. But hey, there is only the Firefox 3.x available
so it obviously can run faster than the current one... Anyway this is
much, much faster than the same browser on my SGI O2 (R10000 CPU
@250MHz).
I still have to polish the GUI: add GTk+ theme which will match the
system, change fonts in the Firefox (the default are ugly), add some
applications and so on. But the system itself is pretty wel usable even
now.
But it is soo noisy...
References:
[1]
gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/SGI%20Octane