[mapesdhs]

Exactly, something which burned ILM for example. They were sold O2s as upgrades over HighIMPACT Indigo2s, a disaster. They were not best pleased. Hence why the reseller model I thought would ultimately be the death of SGI no matter what they did, too many resellers were ripping people and companies off with secretive/manipulative pricing, and selling inappropriate systems just to get the sale.

O2 was excellent for those tasks that were a natural match for the architecture. People forget now but after launch it held the Challice/Shake records for ages, and a surgeon in South Africa told me that for prepping CRT scan summary reports it cut the prep time from an hour to 5 or 10 mins, it was so much faster than previous systems for volumetric imaging, and much cheaper. Complex imaging & video, VRML, textile manufacturing, medical imaging and numerous other tasks, it was great for that. I once sold five O2s to a hospital in NYC. It really did deserve a proper followon with the same arch. People at ILM who followed Nekochan chatter (but couldn't post) were drooling over the idea of an R9K/1GHz 16MB, doing compositing in L2. With its actual specs though, O2 didn't have very good general performance, the CPU/RAM speed is pretty low (try running STREAM on O2, compare it to your Octane2 and Tezro, and see what happens on O2 as you drop the display from 1280x1024 32/32 down to 640x480 16/16, it's amusing). Hard to say whether SGI made a mistake not releasing a more general low end system as SUN typically did, but then SUN did some odd things too at times.

Btw, SGI people told me they'd never intended R10K to be used in O2, but it was so much quicker than R5K that customers just wanted it anyway, but that of course was more expensive, and presumably drew resources away from developing the R5K side. Worse though was having an R5000PC option and selling systems with only 64MB RAM, that should never have been done.

I really like the O2 (infact I've just downgraded from a Tezro to an O2 for my main SGI, fitted a dual-channel Adaptec with case mod for two extra external SCSI ports), but the O2+ was an embarassment. I tried to get the PROM source code released (the sysadmin of sgi.com helped apply some pressure aswell), so that the dual-core R9K/1GHz would become viable (Joe Page had talked to IBM about using a 50% faster 16MB L2), but alas no joy, management said a flat no.

Hmm, I wonder how MXI and MXE would handle your test? Especially MXI. Same tech in theory, though the command ASIC is faster IIRC. Curious as to the gains from the better bandwidth & latency, if any.

Ian.