This is a Silicon Graphics workstation from 1995. Specifically, it is an ‘Teal’ Indigo 2 (as opposed to a ‘Purple’ Indigo 2, which came later). Ordinarily that’s rare enough – these things were about £30,000 brand new. A close look at the case badge though, marks this out as a ‘Teal’ POWER Indigo 2 – where instead of the usual MIPS R4600 or R4400SC CPU modules, we have the rare, unusual, expensive and short-lived MIPS R8000 module.
↫ Jonathan Pallant
It’s rare these days to find an article about exotic hardware that has this many detailed photographs – most people just default to making videos now. Even if the actual contents of the article aren’t interesting, this is some real good hardware pornography, and I salute the author for taking the time to both take and publish these photos in a traditional way. That being said, what makes this particular SGI Indigo 2 so special?
The R8000 is not a CPU in the traditional sense. It is a processor, but that processor is comprised of many individual chips, some of which you can see and some of which are hidden under the heatsink.
The MIPS R8000 was apparently an attempt to wrestle back the Floating-Point crown from rivals. Some accounts report that at 75 MHz, it has around ten times the double-precision floating point throughput of an equivalent Pentium. However, code had to be specially optimised to take best advantage of it and most code wasn’t. It lasted on the market for around 18 months, before bring replaced by the MIPS R10K in the ‘Purple’ Indigo 2.
↫ Jonathan Pallant
And here we see the first little bits of writing on the wall for the future of all the architectures trying to combat the rising tide of x86. SGI’s MIPS, Sun’s SPARC, HP’s PA-RISC, and other processors would stumble along for a few more years after this R8000 module came on the market, but looking back, all of these companies knew which way the wind was blowing, and many of them would sign onto Intel’s Itanium effort. Itanium would fail spectacularly, but the cat was out of the bag, and SGI, Sun, and HP would all be making standard Xeon and Opteron workstations within a a few years.
Absolutely amazing to see this rare of a machine and module lovingly looked after.
OpenBSD/sgi actually supported the POWER Indigo 2, both the R8000 (IP26) and R10000 (IP28) families.
It doesn’t appear that Linux or NetBSD ever did.
SGI, Sun, and HP weren’t afraid of Itanium per se, but the prospect of 64-bit PCs and the economies of scale behind them. We are taking the difference between a $30.000 workstation and a $5.000 workstation here. PCs had already gotten a decent OS in the form of Windows NT (and later Desktop Linux), so the writing was on the wall. A 64-bit PC would sink the RISC workstation market. It didn’t happen with Itanium but it happened with x86-64.
Like many architectures, NetBSD got there first. https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sgimips/
At a moment, I thought this post had something to do with the POWER ISA, and I was like “They ported IRIX to POWER ISA? How could anyone miss that?”. But as it turns out, this is not the case.
SGI’s MIPS, Sun’s SPARC, HP’s PA-RISC and ? You’ve forgotten.
You’ve really forgotten.
DEC Alpha.
SGI never made their own processors & MIPS CPU were and still are in dozens of other systems — including video game consoles such as the N64, PlayStation & PS2, and the PlayStation Portable.
Indeed, which is sad.
Nevertheless, You forgotten IBM Power/AIX workstations.
My memory of Iris and Indigo is now clouded, I recall the adoption of one or the other just before Apple began making inroads into professional publication and pre-press. I was coding postscript, yes it use to be a job! Rupert Murdoch was all in on the computers and automation, we went from archaic IBM and Unix based terminals to SGI then on to Apple workstations in the blink of an eye, but the Indigo was an all time favourite. It was a weird time, in that the newsroom had large format process cameras and SGI workstations being operated side by side, within 5 years or so of that moment Apple and Adobe dominated. I’m talking between 1985 and 1995.
Yes, I remember noticing Iris Indegos around office desks in the 1994 Ron Howard movie “The Paper” starring Michael Keaton.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing. I have owned several NeXT and SGI workstations. I miss the flamboyant design. The performance and noise? Not so much.
Of course, performance can only be measured relative to equivalents at the time, retrospectively almost everything sucks.
And I also wonder about the psychology of color, they stood out like an aurora, it had an impact on mindset when an environment was basically Munsell grey.
Correction: Indigo, not Indego♂️
Really nice link. Internal photos are absolutely great.