SGI O2

The O2 is an entry-level Unix workstation introduced in 1996 by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) to replace their earlier Indy series. Like the Indy, the O2 used a single MIPS microprocessor and was intended to be used mainly for multimedia. Its larger counterpart is the SGI Octane. The O2 was SGI's last attempt at a low-end workstation.

The O2 architecture featured a proprietary high-bandwidth Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) to connect system components. A PCI bus is bridged onto the UMA with one slot available. It had a designer case and an internal modular construction. Two SCSI drives could be mounted on special caddies (1 in the later R10000/R12000 models due to heat constraints) and an optional video capture / sound cassette mounted on the far left side.

The O2 comes in two distinct CPU flavours; the low-end MIPS 180 to 350 MHz R5000- or RM7000-based units and the higher-end 150 to 400 MHz R10000- or R12000-based units.

There are eight DIMM slots on the motherboard and memory, and all O2s are expandable to 1 GB using proprietary 239-pin SDRAM DIMMs. The Memory & Rendering Engine (MRE) ASIC contains the memory controller. Memory is accessed via a 133 MHz 144-bit bus, of which 128 bits are for data and the remaining for ECC. This bus is interfaced by a set of buffers to the 66 MHz 256-bit memory system.

The O2 carries an UltraWide SCSI drive subsystem (Adaptec 7880). Older O2's generally have 4x speed Toshiba CD-ROMs, but any Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM can be used (as well as from other manufacturers, the bezel replacement however is designed to fit Toshiba design and also IRIX cannot utilize CD-DA mode other than Toshiba). Later units have Toshiba DVD-ROMs. The R5000/RM7000 units have two available drive sleds for SCA UltraWide SCSI hard-disks. Because the R10000/R12000 CPU module has a much higher cooling-fan assembly, the R10000/R12000 units have room for only one drive-sled.

The O2 used the CRM chipset specifically developed by SGI for the O2. It was developed to be a low-cost implementation of the OpenGL 1.1 architecture with ARB image extensions in both software and hardware. The chipset consists of the microprocessor, and the ICE, MRE and Display ASICs. All display list and vertex processing, as well as the control of the MRE ASIC is performed by the microprocessor. The ICE ASIC performs the packaging and unpacking of pixels as well as operations on pixel data. The MRE ASIC performs rasterization and texture mapping. Due to the unified memory architecture, the texture and framebuffer memory comes from main memory, resulting in a system that has a variable amount of each memory. The Display Engine generates analog video signals from framebuffer data fetched from the memory for display.

The SGI O2 has an Imaging and Compression Engine (ICE) application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for processing streaming media and still images.[3] ICE operates at 66 MHz and contains a R3000-derived microprocessor serving as the scalar unit to which a 128-bit SIMD unit is attached using the MIPS coprocessor interface.

While CPU frequencies of 180 to 400 MHz seem low today, when the O2 was released in 1996, these speeds were on par with or above the current offerings for the x86 family of computers (cf. Intel's Pentium and AMD's K5). cf: used in writing to introduce something else that should be compared or considered =compare.

六级/考研单词: silicon, counterpart, unify, component, slot, construct, mount, flavor, render, data, buffer, manufacture, utilize, assemble, implement, hardware, parcel, texture, invariable, integrate, medium, compute

Obsolete : The SGI O2 R5000 (majix.org)

o2 1# hinv -mv
CPU: MIPS R5000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.1
FPU: MIPS R5000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 1.0
1 200 MHZ IP32 Processor
Main memory size: 256 Mbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte on Processor 0
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version ADAPTEC 7880
  Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0 (unit 1)
  CDROM: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0
Iris Audio Processor: version A3 revision 0
  PCI Adapter ID (vendor 36868, device 32888) pci slot 1
  PCI Adapter ID (vendor 36868, device 32888) pci slot 2
Video: MVP unit 0 version 1.4
AV: AV1 Card version 1, Camera not connected.

o2 2# /usr/gfx/gfxinfo
Graphics board 0 is "CRM" graphics.
        Managed (":0.0") 1280x1024
        32 + 32 bitplanes

 

July 20, 1998 2:40 p.m. PT, Also tomorrow, SGI will announce that its entry-level O2 line will incorporate the 225-MHz R10000 processor, a speed upgrade from the 195-MHz version of the MIPS chip. The price will remain $10,495. SGI will further cut the price of its Onyx2 Reality supercomputer with two 250-MHz R10000 processors by 45 percent, to $75,000. [link] 新闻的标题叫做：SGI to slash [大幅削减] workstation prices :-)

1998年底美元兑人民币市场加权汇率为8.2789元人民币/美元，比1997年底的8.2798元人民币/美元微跌9点。1998年以前，北京商品住宅价格一直位居全国前列，1997年的平均房价更是高达5478元，比全国平均价格高出3000元。

In January 1998, gold was worth $294.12 per troy ounce. This is equivalent to $508.38 in 2022 dollars. 1 troy ounce = 31.1034768 gram.

乱发了这么些个随笔，汇成一句话，看见某些人兴高采烈地花几万人民币买台电脑，我就想笑。