[rescue] SGI O2 Rescue

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 11:46:50AM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> > It can do fancy tricks, but with R10ks it will stutter more than R5ks.
> 
> I've always wondered why that is.  Clock-for-clock, the R10k should be
> -much- faster than an R5k.

>From what I've heard, the R10k has a much higher memory latency than the
R5k in that machine.  From the sound of it, the machine was never made
to have anything other than an R5k originally, so they did a crummy job
of cramming the R10k in.

To add a bit more insight to some of the short coming of the O2,
reportedly they canceled and uncanceled the moose project 3 times before
the machine managed to make it to the market.
 
> > You shouldn't have to go all that low level.  I would personally expect
> > that dmedia would be able to pull it off on that machine.
> 
> It probably can, but I need to save enough clock cycles for some minor
> OpenGL that needs to happen -each- frame, and, of course, everything has
> to happen in 1/30th of a second.  I'll try dmedia first, though.

Also, look into the REACT OS extensions.  One of the major uses of those
extensions is for when dropped frames aren't an option.

> > However, I haven't had an oportunity to really play with it since the
> > O2 I had extended access to was bogged down with only 64 megs of ram
> 
> That's my current problem.  128M is not enough for doing textured OpenGL
> under IRIX 6.5 on a UMA machine like the O2.

Yeah, for the O2 more than any other SGI machine I've used.  I'd say
that 192megs is a minimum, and, of course, more is better.
 
> > and was running enlightenment and I couldn't change that.
> 
> Enlightenment on an SGI?  That's really, really disgusting.

I know.  I felt so dirty using it, but it was locked by the
administrator since everyone shared only one account on it.