On Fri, 22 Apr 2016, [email protected] wrote: > SGI stuff is still much under wraps as far as I know. Thats why NetBSD > and similar for SGI are still pretty rudimentary. All propriatary, those > groups don't want to use stolen info, and who knows if the documentation > still even exists after the rackable purchase.
Rackable totally needs to release that stuff, but the lawyer-weasels are probably never going to let that happen due to all the cross-licensed code in IRIX. However, I still wish they'd release hardware specs. I wonder what that could hurt? Maybe it's the same type of thing if they OEM'd too many parts. I think IRIX support of any kinds ends this year (for 6.5.30 on a Tezro only). Maybe they will reconsider after they don't get any $$$ from it in order to build some good will and gain some street cred. Yes, I know.. feel free to wake me up anytime... > High clock rates for data busses of modern systems wouldn't work with old > style card edge interconnects AFAIK. Ahh, yeah I forgot that's why they did that (move to BGA and such). I'll bet you are right. It'd have to go in the processor slot. > Also, I don't think the old PPC accelerators for the Amiga or the ones for > the Macs (that sometimes had CPU upgrade slots) would really accelerate > everything - you might get faster processor instructions and maybe L1/L2 > cache -- but memory and I/O are still slow? That's totally true from my recollection. However, some of the boards for the Amiga would co-locate additional RAM on the accel board. That was a bit of an in-between state. Nonetheless the faster CPU(s) would generally have some positive impact. Plus, some of the boards were just plain neat looking and made your Amiga look even-more-awesome (to my geek eyes, at least). > They were really expensive at the time :-) US dollars have lost a lot of > value (especially given overpriced housing.) The old $3000 Tandy system > with a 20 meg hard card and TGA/CGA graphics is like $7000 in todays cash. Which is why I never owned one :-) My parents were so poor when I was a kid I slept in a dresser drawer (until I outgrew it). hehe. I only got cast-off gear at that time, usually 10 years behind the state of the art (mostly stuff my mom found at garage sales). > Amiga stuff was always pretty expensive, and you had to pay VGA monitor > prices for it's crappy TV display (1084S). Awww. That truth stings. :-) It sure was a purty video display and playing SNES and Genesis games on it rocked. > And yea, at least Atari stuff was made in Taiwan so they were using > cheaper labor then too. Heh, Atari always was a forerunner. Guess they pioneered offshoring, too. :-) > You gotta build it! Oh man, I can barely repair my guitar amps when they fail. You guys would laugh hard watching me try to run a scope, too. I can fix monitors, sometimes (used to do it back in the day for a job). Mostly, I'm a 'test post' electronics tech. I can measure voltages, run a solder-sucker, tell the diff between most components, and possibly not burn and bird-crap all my joints, but I pretty well suck at electronics. I'm not even close to skilled enough with digital component layout tools, logic analyzers, verilog, FPGAS, etc.. as what I'd need to be and I doubt I could learn it fast enough to be useful, but who knows. Like you say, the tools today are amazing. I'm more of a software and integration guy, but I'm interested in just about everything technical, even biology (esp female biology, har har) ! :-) -Swift
