IRIX 6.4? (was: Re: [SunRescue] SS10 SX board...curious)

[Dave McGuire]

  Man, I've got a 16MHz R3000-based Personal Iris that does better
than that.  There's *something wrong* here.

       -Dave McGuire

On August 7, nick at snowman.net wrote:
> We've obviously got different ideas of what "not too bad" means.  I tried
> to start one of the GUI admin tools, and it made the sound, but didn't do
> anything.  About half an hour later I looked, still nothing.  Then when I
> got back in from lunch (~1.5 hrs after I double clicked) I was amazed to
> see it up and running.  I had assumed it had cored or otherwise
> died.  That is one extreme, I was also amazed at how well it did GL stuff
> ( I really shouldn't have been), but I still wouldn't want to ever use it
> for my workstation.
> 	Nick
> 
> On Mon, 7 Aug 2000, Bjrn Ramqvist wrote:
> 
> > nick at snowman.net wrote:
> > > 
> > > Hehe, anything much older than an O2 won't run 6.4 in any worthwhile
> > > way.  I know, I've got a "speed daemon" r5k 180mhz indy running 6.4.7 (I
> > > think, might be 6.4.8), and it HURTS.  I've never seen a gui that slow
> > > since I ditched the 386 that was running xfree86.  It might work ok sorta
> > > mabey if you nuked all the GUI, and had a nice GIO scsi system, running
> > > nothing but exactly what you needed.
> > 
> > I believe you refer to IRIX 6.5, 6.4 were never named "6.4.x" until the
> > introduction of 6.5.
> > I run IRIX 6.5.8 on my 128MB R4600PC-100 Indy at home, and that's not
> > too bad IMO. I'd even prefer that over an SS2, actually. Only thing that
> > keeps the graphics slow is the CPU load for all 24bit->8bit conversion.
> > 
> > In this case, SGI has dropped support for the 32-bit platforms from IRIX
> > 6, ie all the R3000-based machines. That includes the R3k Indigo (not
> > the R4k based), all the R3k based IRISes and the Chrimson. That's
> > perfectly understandable, since it would only be painful to keep
> > supporting these, as technology tends to go forward in a drastic speed.
> > Imagine a R3000 Indigo "maxed out" with 96MB of RAM... I see the point
> > in dropping those old toasters, really.
> > 
> > IRIX on an R5k based machine is not that painful. It's quite useful for
> > home use IMO, whereas at work I'd would go for atleast Indigo 2/R10k or
> > Octane. Keep in mind that the R5k still lives a quite happy life in an
> > O2, because of all it's hardware tweaks around the CPU. (Putting an R10k
> > into an O2 doesn't give it that performance boost you would imagine, in
> > all aspects)
> > 
> > If anyone wants to run old R3000 beasts, there's always IRIX 5.3, which
> > IMO is not that bad either. Lightweight and pretty solid.
> > 
> > 	/Regards, Bjorn
> > _______________________________________________
> > Rescue maillist  -  Rescue at sunhelp.org
> > http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
> > 
> 
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