[thejpster]

Hello! I have recently acquired a POWER Indigo 2. It had no RAM and no hard drive, but that's sorted and it's working well. I was recommend to talk to sgidepot, and they were very helpful.

Here's the hinv:

Iris Audio Processor: version A2 revision 1.1.0
1 75 MHZ IP26 Processor
CPU: MIPS R8000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.2
FPU: MIPS R8010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 0.1
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board bi-directional parallel port
Data cache size: 16 Kbytes
Instruction cache size: 16 Kbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 2 Mbytes
Main memory size: 64 Mbytes
EISA bus: adapter 0
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version WD33C93B, revision D
 CDROM: unit 5 on SCSI controller 1
 Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 1
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision D
 Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
Graphics board: GR3-Elan

I've got IRIX 6.2 installed into the 4GB SCSI drive, from a BlueSCSI hosting some ISOs. I've installed CD1 and CD2 and the patches Applications CD, plus a few other tardist files I found. I've also got SoftWindows working. The C and C++ compilers are next on my list.

But what next? If I take it to shows, what would really show the R8000 in the best light, compared to the RiscPC 700 it sits next to for example.

[robespierre]

Known as "TFP" during its development, the R8000 advantage (for 1994) was its ability to stream data through the processor at the same time as it did multiple integer and floating point operations per cycle. This was intended for supercomputing type applications (what you would think of running on a Cray, etc). One example of that type of application is computational fluid dynamics.

The R8000 was impressive at the time, but the more highly integrated R10000 (1995) had such a clock speed advantage that it quickly overshadowed the TFP for most tasks.

[vishnu]

You can download the compiler from my website; smigt.org/m65 - enjoy!

[thejpster]

If you're in the UK, this machine will be at RetroFest 2025, in Swindon, on 31 May and 1 June.

I'll also have a Sun Ultra 80, an HP 9000 Visualize B132L and an HP 9000 Visualize C3000, so you can cross-compare Indigo Magic Desktop with Open Windows, HP View and CDE.