>So, what exactly is the benifit of having an SGI machine as opposed to PC or
>Mac? I don't have any experience with those type of computers. What
>operating system do they run?
the main benefit is the faster system bus, which includes access between
ram and cpu, but also your main ram is also your texture/z-buffer/yadda yadda
ram for video---meaning your image-bits neednt travel from ram to video-ram
before exiting your system...and the bandwidth even in a lowly O2 is around
2 GB/s, over 2x as fast as the best PCI/AGP bus out there in PC-land these
days.
you can get a 64bit processor in an O2 (granted that'll cost more than the
$5k deal i spoke of earlier), and you can easily fit 2gb of ram into one.
it's got 2x ultrascsi controllers onboard, digital+analog sound/video in/out
(plug an s-video source in and capture, or dump to it), 10/100 enet,
and extremely bad-ass graphics performance...i've played quake in GL-mode
at 1280x1024 without pegging the system.
they run irix (altho theres a linux port in progress =) --check out
www.linux.sgi.com. it doesn't yet run on o2 h/w), which is not as good
as linux at some things, but is steadily improving. for other things
it is far better than linux...easily scales up past 100processors in
a single "machine", has support for stopping, moving (if desired), and
restarting jobs -- after a reboot, or on a different machine!
it's kinda gui, in that a lot of the admin tools are tough to use from
the command line tho not impossible, and i certainly wouldn't choose
irix for anything other than an sgi machine (linux is my true love).
but all in all the system is getting more usable and i already like it
more than solaris or digital unix.
aside from personal experience, i take data from http://www.sgi.com/o2.
these are sweet little machines, but the high-end of PC's will catch
up eventually. of course, these have been available for over 2 years,
since before pII was publicly available, so they're starting to get
long in the tooth. if you want to drool, go check out the specs on
an octane @ www.sgi.com...expensive (more than i'll spend on my next car,
when equipped with reasonable featureset) but absolutely incredibly zippy.
aint technology great?
anyway i feel like an evangelist and really all i am is a happy customer,
so i'll not say anything more in public.
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