“SGI is widely expected to make a statement of direction that will see the company push Itanium-based machines employing open source systems and middleware software along side its MIPS-based Origin servers and Onyx visualization systems (think of it as workstations created directly from slices of a parallel supercomputer and you’ll get the right idea), which run the Irix variant of Unix.” Read the story.
SGI to Develop MIPS Chips for Origin, Onyx
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“The R14000 was a shrink of the 400MHz R12000 processor, which delivered two floating point operations per second ”
…or did my roomate slip lsd into my serial this morning…two ops per sec? wtf?
The R12000 did a lot more than two floating point operations per second :-). More information on the R12000 and the R10000 chips can be found here:
http://www.sgi.com/origin/2000/microprocessors.html
Cheers,
Ralph
The R14000 was a shrink of the 400MHz R12000 processor, which delivered two floating point operations per second or 800 megaflops of power.
s/operations per second/operations per cycle/
400 million cycles / second * 2 fp operations / cycle = 800 million fp operations / second
Gotta love the Reg
I’m glad this was posted.
After all the rants about G4s having such low clock speeds compared to a 2.5GHz P4 here is a company who specialises in High Performance Computing and yet intentionally keep their clock speed as low as possible.
Clockspeed isn’t everything…
I have to salute SGI also for not pushing clock speed.
That isn’t meant to be an apology for Apple v Intel etc.
As long as the apps are massively distributed then lots of packed slower cooler cpus will trounce the fewer 70W+ hotdogs. A pity it won’t work for the typical home user, but since I also want 3 or 4 OSs live at same time I also would settle for slower silent cpus even C3s with an Athlon for the master all on a KVM.
A real benefit of this type of engineering is that by trailing a yr or so behind the freq curve, the R/D costs are going to be much lower & affordable & the projects much less risky. Very few companies do any ASIC engineering above 500MHz, I could probably list most of them on my digits.
Also the other components in the sytem will look relatively faster, a 500MHz cpu compared to a P4 at 2.5GHz is five times better matched to external DRAM, HD systems etc. So the overall speed loss will be much less than the 5x suggested.
In the most recent issue of EET there is some realisation among the semiconductor companies that the networking customers in dire straits that they be, would rather survive with 2.5G optical than go bust on 10G for now.
Example Xilinx customers would rather have FPGA with embedded PPC cores run 10% slower for about 1/3 the cost than the original unyieldable 300MHz freq.
The current x86 @ 2GHz is a highly distorted form of computing that only seems to produce the speed on a few tuned apps, most of my apps would run as well on half speed cpus!
Supporting Linux on Itanium is probably a smart move because if high-end graphics customers are going to start shifting from Irix/MIPS to Lintel to save money, they would probably prefer to buy it from a proven vendor like SGI itself, rather than from someone else, so SGI will get the money either way (hopefully) by creating two product lines that essentially compete with each other. Neat (in theory).
> Snell says that at 600MHz, the core of the R14000A
> processor – designed by SGI and built using a 0.13
> micron copper process by NEC – throws off about 17
> watts of heat. . . .
> By contrast, the Sun UltraSparc-III core throws off
> 70 watts to 80 watts depending on the clock speed,
> and that other RISC processors on the market and the
> future Itanium chips dissipate anywhere from 110 watts
> to 130 watts per processor core, according to Snell.
Holy crow, that’s my kind of processor (17W!). It’s interesting that not all RISC’s are created equal.
Why aren’t any manufacturers making mobo’s (that we can buy) with these types of processors on them? mmm . . . http://www.linuxmips.net/
You don’t have to go to mips or arm to find low power.
The VIA miniITX boards use the CIII and uses 7W for the whole board 7″x7″ complete with vid,lan,snd etc.
The fastest 800MHz is not blazingly fast, reviews I’ve seen compare to half speed of an Athlon but I can live with that for quite a few things. Only tiny fan used. About $110 with cpu.
http://www.caseoutlet.com/NWPc/2677/itx2677.html
Also Shuttle SpaceWalker has a slightly larger mobo that allows for hotter P4 & Athlons or cooler silent C3s, sv24 etc.
When Via comes out with 1GHz version, I’ll probably put a few in a box +KVM. The 1GHz chip is only a few $ more than 800MHz but it is soldered on board.
If you really want mips, there are embedded boards out there, or you could go for the game box route. Unfortunately cheap cpu chips doesn’t mean cheap boards, unless its x86.