The rare POWER Indigo 2
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.