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