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SGI launches R16000
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Dec 27, 2002 02:26 AM
from the more-power-damnit dept.
from the more-power-damnit dept.
nkrgovic writes " SGI has just launched a new CPU - the long expected R16000. The new CPU works on 700MHz, has 4MB secondary cache and more goodies.
For now the new CPU is only used in SGI's Fuel workstations, but we should expect to see it pretty soon in SGI's Origin servers as well. With new high density compute nodes this should make the Origin's the fastest supercomputing server per square foot."
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I'm running one with IRIX! (Score:3, Funny)
It runs IRIX? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It runs IRIX? (Score:4, Informative)
SGI will continue to make investments in IRIX and MIPS until it makes sense to move all of their products and customers to Linux on IA64, and that may not happen until theres something better than Linux+IA64 out
Linux isn't there yet for the bread and butter SGI customers. Neither is IA64.
700 MHz? (Score:1, Funny)
The new CPU works on 700MHz
taking a page out of apple's playbook I see..
congratulations on breaking the elusive 500MHz barrier!
*chuckle*
guess what (Score:1, Funny)
"fastest supercomputing server per square foot" (Score:2, Funny)
Not a general purpose processor (Score:4, Interesting)
purpose processor like the P4 or Athlon. For
specific floating point intensive problems, they
can be quite effective. What is annoying is that
they are usually 2 or more generations behind in
manufacturing process capability. So the lines
and heat dissipation in the 3GHz P4 are much more
advanced than the R16000.
Also, SGI has an annoying tendency to use
proprietary ASIC's in the their memory which
make their entire system much more expensive
than it need be. Some of this is because
their design cycle is so long that when SGI
committed to a architecture, the performance
just wasn't there.
Given these constraints, it is hard to see
how SGI could market "cost-sensitive" systems.
Computer power per watt? (Score:3, Interesting)
Mhz Muppets (Score:4, Informative)
Disclaimer: I know ive ignored how much work can be done in an instruction, pipelineing and other features, but im sick of all this idiotic posts that think mhz is anything but a meaningless indication of processor speed, like a bogomip
Too little too late?? (Score:1)
SGI is dying (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other end, their HPC (super-computers) is being attacked from above. On that sector, price is not really a problem, its just pure performance. And there too they are being beaten, SGI just does not have the research power that
NEC or IBM can have. So they are starting to be pretty much behind, so they become not only more expensive (which does not really matter), but more importantly much slower...
Also on the workstation market, their desktop SUCKS, its just a pain to use. They are still stuck in the pre-win95 era... It might have been good compared to win3.1 or twm, but it just is not in the same world as GNOME, KDE, WinXP or MacOSX.
Also, their other strengh where there graphics board, they invented modern 3D hardware. And for a long time the roadmap for the PC 3d hardware was simple, they just had to do what SGI already had, but we have now passed a point where the PC hardware has actually more features then the SGI stuff. The only difference now between the pro and game markets are the amount of ram/cache and those "pro" cards exist on PCs. They do cost $ 2000-3000, but they are nowhere near the cost of the SGI workstation that includes them...
SGI has no future. They have been losing money for years. I have been thinking for quite a while that they where a good target for an acquisition, but now that MSFT has bought much of their patents. It might be cheaper to wait for them to go bankrupt and to pick up the pieces. They where in a fast playing game and they have gotten slow.....
So what are the benchmarks? (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience SGI's are slow but are extremely scalable. With IA32-based machines you'd be lucky to get 4 CPU's sharing memory, unlike the 64+ you get from SGI. Very good for scientific codes but not so hot for applications that are either not parallelizable at all, or embarassingly parallelizable such as Seti@Home or ray-tracing a feature film.
SPEC (Score:4, Informative)
OK there are no numbers for 16K but here the numbers for 600Mhz 14K
SPECint2000 500
SPECfp2000 529
For comparison
UltraSPARC III Cu 1.015GHz
SPECint2000 576
SPECfp2000 775
AMD XP 2800
SPECint2000 913
SPECfp2000 843
INTEL P4 2.8
SPECint2000 1040
SPECfp2000 1048
competition (Score:2, Funny)
SGI's reality distortion field: fully operational (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh? Quick, everyone with Radeon 9700 PRO graphics boards in your PCs, make sure you have them in tower cases, or something!
For reference, the ATI specs page states:
I guess SGI might refer to actual output precision, i.e. the RAMDAC D/A-converters... In that case, it seems they still have the edge, since the ATI boards only have 10 bits per component. Still, I think that's of lesser value than the actual precision image operations are performed at.
processor features (Score:5, Funny)
1.???
2.Profit!
3.Build new processor.
BUT (Score:3, Informative)
Humm (Score:1)
How big is the target marked? (Score:2)
It's not the very parallell computing, like movie rendering. Clusters, usually Linux clusters do much better compared to cost.
It's not most kinds of servers, that are usually IO bound and it's the disks, controller, NIC and mobo (backplane) that make the server. Few of those need more than dual MP cpus to do well.
I know roughly where the SGIs still shine. But how many really have those specific needs? Not many that I can think of.
Kjella
Here's my take (Score:1)
Out of sheer boredom, I blew about $80 on an SGI from eBay.
Pretty old machine. 133MHz, 64MB, dual 2GB SCSI drives.
IRIX is pretty neat. It had some pretty decent 3D hardware. The installed Demos were equal to about a 400MHz Pentium II with a graphics card that didn't come out until 1998. No idea what year this SGI came out. early 90's?
I've also used O2's at some customers sites, and they're about as fast as the fastest wintel desktop you can get right now, at least in the CAD programs and such that they use. They tell us the Windows boxes can't handle the file sizes and datasets they use, and a lot of the software isn't even availble under 2K/NT.
Whose chip is it anyway? (Score:2)
Isn't it MIPS that make the CPUs?
(This is not sarcasm, I really wanna know.)
die size (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I USED to like SGI, but now this ... (Score:1)
Looks like SGI is a Poindexter and TIA/Bush whore.
This is from their website concerning their "Information Dominance Solution" (Jesus that sounds fucking creepy).
"Today, governments worldwide are inundated with an abundance of data but a shortage of information that supports the decision-making process. In the future, a variety of sources and sensors will continue to generate ever-increasing amounts of such data. That data includes text-based information and records along with more complex media types such as video, audio, imagery, scans, electronic emissions, and other geo-referenced data."
Translation: Governments are finding it harder and harder to spy on their citizens.
"SGI has developed a variety of visualization and computing technologies ideally suited to allow government decision makers to rapidly assimilate the growing amounts and diverse types of data being collected. Finding the few important bits of information out of mountains of data is the job of the SGI Decision Support Center (DSC) solution, which uses large-scale visualization, high-performance computing, and the management of complex data to provide mission-critical information to support rapid and confident decision-making cycles. "
Translation: SGI wants to help.
Wait a minute... (Score:2)
Hey, according to intel, this processor, at 700MHz, is about 4 years old, and has no hope of competing with intel's True MHz processors!
Clock Speed is just one of the many factors (Score:1)
In case we /. SGI.... (Score:1, Informative)
* Four-way superscalar, 64-bit architecture
* Out-of-order instruction execution
* Five separate execution units
* MIPS 4 instruction set
* 32KB two-way set-associative on-chip instruction cache
* 4MB fast secondary cache
Key Architecture Features
* 3.2GB/sec main memory peak bandwidth
* 1.6GB/sec system-to-graphics interconnect
* VPro graphics
* MIPS RISC processing, 64K primary cache, 4MB secondary cache
* Optimized 200 MHz front-side bus
* 32- or 64-bit binaries
* Priority I/O
* Integrated PCI
Last Post! (Score:1)
This language was developed at the Marin County Center for T'ai Chi,
Mellowness and Computer Programming (now defunct), as an alternative to
the more intense atmosphere in nearby Silicon Valley.
The center was ideal for programmers who liked to soak in hot tubs while
they worked. Unfortunately few programmers could survive there because the
center outlawed Pizza and Coca-Cola in favor of Tofu and Perrier.
Many mourn the demise of LAIDBACK because of its reputation as a gentle and
non-threatening language since all error messages are in lower case. For
example, LAIDBACK responded to syntax errors with the message:
"i hate to bother you, but i just can't relate to that. can
you find the time to try it again?"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Re:Behind the times. (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought enough material had finally invaded the net for people to realize Mhz means nothing... I guess I was wrong.
Let's play what if... cause I don't have any facts on this processor: What if the mov operation of said processor is 1 cycle, whereas mov of pentium is 7?...
Where does that put you?
Books are written on CPUs. pick one up, and you'll understand Mhz means nothing.
Re:Behind the times. (Score:4, Informative)
SGI's workstation line is largely unimpressive, especially for the 99% case of computer users, hell, even engineers.
The problem is, for a small set of jobs, for a small set of people, nothing else is suficient - at any price. You're either using an SGI, or the work isn't taking place.
That market is continuing to erode, but i dont think it will ever dissolve completely. I think eventually SGi will effectively become a US govt subsidized entity. SGI continues to build the systems that only governments need and only government agencies can afford.
Clustering has nothing to do with the markets SGI sells in. Please don't mention it, it makes me think you don't know what you're talking about.
Do you ?
Re:Behind the times. (Score:5, Informative)
While it was the first implementation of MIPS4, and it was an FP monster, and had a huge TLB for the time, it really wasn't so hot as a general purpose CPU.
A far as "true 64 bit" in the R4000, which version of IRIX ran on R4k with 64 bit pointers ? 6.2 and 6.5 certainly don't on my IP22.
When the R3k came out it was the first real example of commercially FAST and successful RISC design. It was used in multiple machines from multiple companies. SGI didn't "really" up the ante again until R10k, which was their first offering that was superpipelined and superscalar.
Finally, regarding SGI and clustering:
SGI is not price-competitive with shared-nothing clusters of PCs or Alphas. Nor is it trying to be. You probably know what the O2k/O3k systems are good at and how they differ from any other system being sold today, othewise you wouldn't have responded to me. I think my statement is valid --- the SGI big iron solves problems that shared nothing clusters CANT. Furthermore, they're so much more expensive than shared nothings that if you need shared nothing and buy origin, you're silly.
Re:Behind the times. (Score:1)
Re:Behind the times. (Score:4, Informative)
You, sir, are almost completely uninformed. The R16000 is an R10000 variant, just like the R12000 and R14000 before it. It is not a vector processor, and has no vector units. The R16000 is, furthermore, a desktop processor in its own right, because it's currently being used in the Fuel workstation.
Incidentally, SGI divested itself of Cray some time ago. Cray was bought by a company called Tera Computing, which then changed its name to Cray. They're building the SV2 vector supercomputer now, using their own processors, and they also have an arrangement with NEC to market the SX-6 in the United States with a Cray logo, but that's strictly a resale agreement.
Re:Behind the times. (Score:5, Funny)
True, but your architecture still sux
Re:too little too late (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Behind the times. (Score:1)
Another great example of this is Intergraph, they bought the Intel crap as well...
btw, many Intel systems suffer from performance issues that are just there because of the 20+ years compatibility built in. Something 'proprietary' systems usually don't suffer from.
Remember, it's not just megahurtzen that counts!
Re:Behind the times. (Score:5, Funny)
I guess that makes it faster than my car. :)
Re:Behind the times. (Score:2)
Re:Behind the times. (Score:1)
I don't know that the 16000 is the cat's PJ's, but complaining that the CPU clock speed isn't as fast as some other processor is --- well, naive.
Re:too little too late (Score:1)
As far as I know, most(?) of the rendering farms they've been using in Hollywood lately have been running Linux.
And as another poster already mentioned, playstations also use MIPS CPUs. Including the PS2.
Did you ever consider that perhaps Sony and Nintendo didn't use the top of the line CPUs? Or why do you think they can sell a Playstation 2 for $200 when SGI workstations run at what? $5000 and up?
Professional journalists investigate their facts.
Re:too little too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Come on people. You all root for the Athlon when it is clocked well under the P4, yet you believe that SGI's MIPS line is crap when it tops out at 700Mhz???
Sun's UltraSPARC III Cu tops out at 1.05Ghz last I checked. Does that mean that the P4 at 3Ghz stomps the hell out of it? If you said yes, you are a fucking idiot.
People, the Unix world is far far different from what you are used to in PC land. High speed backplanes, dedicated busses, huge amount of L1 cache, insane L2 cache, incredibly efficient cpu designs (where 1 clock per instruction is pretty much the norm and cache misses don't occur every 3 operations), hot swap damn-near-everything, upwards of 72 processors and 288 GB of RAM...
It all adds up to a fucking badass machine that smacks the piss out of any PC on the planet when it comes to getting its job done. Don't compare apples to oranges. The applications these machines are designed for do not include Quake 3. The benchmarks you have memorized don't mean a damn thing in this realm, so go back home.
Getting back to the article, I'm glad to see SGI coming out with a new CPU. I still see a few SGIs in the wild now and again. If they lock down Irix a bit more security wise and expand their target market, they might be a decent competitor for Sun within the next 10 years. I don't see them winning any shining star awards right off the bat, but if they are persistant they'll do alright in the long run.
Re:too little too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:too little too late (Score:4, Informative)
Two way systems are not data center solutions that IBM, Sun, and SGI are competing for with this kind of hardware.
Even if they were, you're ignoring the fact that you cannot physically pack as many CPUs with Intel or AMD as with MIPS, Power4, or Sparc into a chassis. Part of the reason they are clocked slower is because you need to balance heat management with performance density when you're dealing with the big servers.
These boxes are about aggregate compute and storage power per dollar, not about whether the individual CPU cores smoke. The only place you see these cores as singletons is workstations (Single-cored "servers" are usually just the same or similar motherboards as a workstation, but in a case that has a beefier power supply and room for a useful number of hot-swap cages.)
You try and pack 32 Intel cores at 3GHz into a chassis that will handle the same number of MIPS cores, and the only thing you're going to get is voltage underflow from an overloaded power supply. Beef up the power supply, and within minutes you're going to be getting that wonderful whiff of frying, overheated electronics.
Raw performance of a core is only one factor in engineering a complete server. Anyone who claims otherwise has clearly not been involved with the hardware end of this industry.
Re:Behind the times. (Score:4, Informative)
You must remember, the R16000 is 64-bit, not 32-bit.
Also, it has 4000k of L2 cache, not 256k or 512k.
Also, out-of-order instruction execution, x86 chips can't do this.
you are trying to compare two things that are completely different.
Re:Behind the times. (Score:5, Informative)
For the record, the R10000 series can run either 32-bit or 64-bit code. All other things being equal, the 32-bit version of a program will run faster than the 64-bit version; you can fit more 32-bit ints into cache at once than 64-bit ints, so the 64-bit version of a program generally suffers more cache misses than its 32-bit counterpart.
On an SGI box, you don't compile for 64-bit unless you absolutely have to address more than 2 GB of virtual memory.
Also, it has 4000k of L2 cache, not 256k or 512k.
That's pretty puny for an SGI. The processors they use in the Origin servers have typically been equipped with 8 MB of secondary cache; the 4 MB version must be just for the workstations, to keep costs manageable.
you are trying to compare two things that are completely different.
On this point, however, you're 100% correct.
Re:too little too late (Score:4, Interesting)
The N64 did well as a system, and had far more power than the playstation. The playstation just did incredibly well.
Hollywood is a city, not a company. I am assuming you are talking about 3D and compositing visual effects studios, of which a few are near Hollywood, California. They aren't going to BSD, they are going to Linux, not just for rendering, but for workstations. Irix is unix and it makes it a very flexible choice for an OS. Because Linux is so similiar, it is also a flexible and powerful.
The N64 was what? (Score:2)
On another note, I'm not even going to begin to comment on your thoughts on clock speed etc. I'm sure everyone else will flame you over the whole Megahertz Myth®.
So wrong (Score:2)
-psy
Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA (Score:2, Interesting)
I've seen two jokes with Soviet Russia now. And I'm not laughing. Can someone let me in on the inside joke here?
Re:faster than anything you have used. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:what about? (Score:1)
Another hot SGI box... (Score:2)
Octane workstation
24" HD monitor, 21" monitor
dual R12000 @ 400 MHz
two internal scsi drives
internal DDS4 tape drive
two XIO gfx cards
fibrechannel XIO gfx card w/ external ciprico fibre raid
video capture XIO card
scsi pci card w/ assorted external drives
two weirdo data capture pci cards
Oops, now that I think of it, he does have sort of a mod... he bought an LED lightbar from reputable.com to replace the incandescent bar after it burnt out.
The machine is used pretty heavily to analyze video signals from various bits of broadcast and closed-circuit sources.
Another odd tidbit... he runs a much older version of IRIX 6.5.x, not the more recent 6.5.17 or 6.5.18. (IRIX and its applications and freeware CD sets are updated quarterly). Does the job, I guess, so no major reason to upgrade.
Re:Why only 700Mhz? (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you read the SPECint and SPECfp results posted above? The Pentium4 runs at 6 (six) times this cpu's speed, yet only scores twice. Talk about good cpu design.
You should also keep in mind that SGI has some ass kicking technology when it comes to cpu and memory interconnect. NUMAFlex makes it possible to have a penalty as little as 1.5 vs 1 for memory accesses outside the local ram banks. Now try doing that with commodity x86 hardware. For problems that aren't easily broken down in small parts and, that have huge datasets, nothing touches SGI.
Kudos to the SGI engineers for their great job.
A long time SGI fan :)
Re:wow (Score:1)
A linuxfarm may be much cheaper performance/dollar but it will suck bigtime on tasks that require closely-coupled systems like fluid-dynamics and material stress calculations, etc.
Re:Why should we care ? (Score:1)
Way to cover all the bases.
Re:Intelligent Engineering (Score:1)
That aside, why doesn't everyone here understand that the more competing architectures we have the BETTER - and why compare this R16000 to a P4 when it's obviously a competitior for the (800Mhz) Itanium?
Re:Intelligent Engineering (Score:1)
Uhm, it's the compiler developers task to make sure that their compiler supports the architecture, not the other way around. And, GCC is absolute crap on MIPS, even the latest version.
Re:too little too late (Score:2)
Are you kidding? The reason that the PS seemed 'smoother' than the N64 was that it had almost no graphic features turned on. Don't believe me? Fire up Ridge Racer and watch the road beneath you. Notice that it turns all zig-zaggey when it gets close enough to you? That was one of the limitations of the PS hardware. It wasn't doing anywhere close to the number of calculations per pixel that the N64 was doing.
The real reason that the PS appeared 'smoother' was that it used minimal graphics tricks and pumped around 300k triangles on the screen. The N64 had all the features turned on and was getting around 100k triangles. So the result was that the N64 had fewer triangles to work with, but much MUCH better texture quality.
As for being a nail in SGI's coffin, I agree with you, but not for the reason you suggest. The N64 was both quite powerful and quite popular. The PS may have done better, that doesn't mean that the N64 didn't do well. The SGI processor did just fine, but they pretty much designed themselves out of business. Why are they charging a premium for their hardware when they can get a slimmed down system crammed into $150 box? In reality, that may or may not have directly affected their credibility. But it did significantly lower the value of the effects they were able to accomplish. Suddenly, consumer hardware can do what SGI does. Hrmm Why do I want this expensive box again?
"PC's running bsd are still a far greater value than expensive sgi hardware."
No argument here. Though I believe SGIs have their place, I think your comment's right on the ball. SGI didn't isn't doing enough to wow customers. Let me give you an example, when they launched the Intel based NT Line, there was only one real major difference between that machine and any other PC on the market was that it had a much faster bus between the RAM and the graphic chip. The problem is, what do you do with that when everything's designed around a 1x AGP bus? (this was 2-3 years ago..)
My company has a particular application today (but not back when we had the machines) to get ludicrious amounts of data to the graphics processor, but that's a very specific need. Not something you can build a whole company around.
They should have done more than just having the fast graphic bus if they were going to cater to the Wintel crowd.
So yeah, I basically agree with what you said, but your details about the N64 were significantly wrong.
Re:Why only 700Mhz? (WHY AM I TROLLED?) (Score:1)
Re:Why only 700Mhz? (Score:2)
CISC is even more of MHz increaser, because the decoding of the instruction gets chopped up into many parts too...
Re:what about? (Score:2)
I guess that makes moderators insane...
(or too lazy to understand the thread)
Re:several have (Score:1)
Re:Behind the times. (Score:1)
This is because an Octane2 can play back a movie at half of film resolution (1024x778) at 24fps, UNCOMPRESSED.
Being able to play back a 24fps movie uncompressed at 1/2 of film resolution (as opposed to playing it back at something like 640x480 or 720x480) is necessary for digital color grading because you need to be able to see if the correction operations you are applying degrade image sharpness and how they affect the appearance of grain. The movie has to be uncompressed because maximum image quality is a must. Even if the final images are uncompressed, the proxy images (the source images and final images are at 2048x1556 uncompressed, the proxy images used (in place of the full resolution images while the artist does his/her work) to keep test rendering time down to an acceptable level are "only" 1024x788 and uncompressed) must also remain uncompressed, because you don't want compression artifacts affecting your judgement of the picture quality. Compression artifacts in the work/proxy image can affect your evaluation of the grain appearance in a shot, etc.
How are Octane2s able to do this? Simple: SGI systems are designed to have massive I/O bandwidth. SGI's Octane (and, thusly, the Octane2) uses a crossbar-switch to send data between the components (RAM, CPU, graphics, hard disks, etc.) instead of using a system bus. The crossbar-switch can give a component a dedicated data channel to another component. For example, the CPU can be writing stuff to the hard disk (let's assume that the CPU is generating it's own data and doesn't need to access RAM to get the data) while the graphics card fetches stuff from RAM, and they can all work at maximum speed. With a system bus, the whole computer has to share that bus, so the components can only operate at full speed some of the time.