SGI Octane ========== This evening I decided to fire up my Silicon Graphics Octane workstation [1]. It's big, noisy but cool: ----------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------- 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