SGI Announces MIPS and IRIX End of Production

ramakant writes "Considering the recent news regarding their dismal financial situation, it should come as no surprise that SGI announced end of production for MIPS based hardware and the IRIX operating system. From the article: "SGI launched the MIPS/IRIX family of products in 1988. Since then, this technology has powered servers, workstations, and visualization systems used extensively in Manufacturing, Media, Science, Government/Defense, and Energy. After nearly two decades of leading the world in innovation and versatility, the MIPS IRIX products will end their general availability on December 29, 2006." IRIX has always been my favored OS, and I'll be sad to see it gone. Hopefully my O2 will survive for many years to come."

Re:MIPS is going away?

[OrangeTide]

Systems with a clean instruction set are apparently unpopular in the real world.

PowerPC is rather nice, but it's not as clean. (but it is easier to use)

Re:MIPS is going away?

[DrDitto]

MIPS is not going away. They are a seperate company that now focuses on the high-end embedded market.

ARM is patented

[tepples]

ARM?

MIPS is popular because it's unpatented (except for a few less common instructions, which aren't taught in Computer Organization and Design anyway). A common term project in computer architecture courses is to design a reduced implementation of the MIPS architecture on an FPGA [wikipedia.org]; some students go beyond this and end up with Plasma [opencores.org]. The ARM architecture, on the other hand, is still patented.

(arcem isn't maintained, from the looks of it, but it's a neat pure-hardware-level ARM platform simulator.)

The most popular ARM platform simulator nowadays seems to be VisualBoyAdvance [ngemu.com].

Re:MIPS is going away?

[ajlitt]

MIPS isn't going away. MIPS is very popular for embedded video processing. TiVo is MIPS (now, at least), the PSP is MIPS, and many DVD players are based on a MIPS. MIPS is still popular because the ISA isn't patented and there are a number of compatible cores out there.

Re:MIPS is going away?

[10Ghz]

SGI MIPS-workstations are going away, MIPS itself is not going anywhere, It's still running in millions of embedded devices, and more will be announced in the future.

Such a crowded graveyard, big deal.

[museumpeace]

Apollo, DEC, Amdahl, Prime, RCA, Remington Rand, GE, Univac, Perkin Elmer, MassComp, Concurrent Computer, Compaq, Sequent, Encore, Xerox, Scientific Data Systems, Wang, GO corporation [wikipedia.org]...and so many more.

The only lesson you could profit from in all this carnage is knowing when to sell your shares, when to find a good merger rather than waiting for the bankers to hold a fire sale of your patent portfolio.

If you read all the way to the bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of us who still work at SGI and continue to support this product line,
also of importance at the bottom of the article is:

SGI is also committed to offering our customer a full level of support needed to protect their investment in SGI products. End of support (EOS) for MIPS/IRIX products is currently scheduled for no sooner than December 2013. SGI Technology Solutions is continuously evaluating the demand for extended support and may consider longer extensions if necessary.

Re:ARM is patented

[dgatwood]

The ARM architecture, on the other hand, is still patented.

Those patents should all have expired by now, at least for the original architecture. Patents filed prior to June 8, 1994 have a term of 20 years from filing date or 17 years fro issue date, whichever is greater. ARM1 was in development testing in 1985 and shipped in 1986. Unless some of those patents too more than four years to be issued, they should be in the clear by now. Of course, you'll have to do a search to be completely certain, but....

The thumb instruction set, on the other hand, does have currently active patents, I believe.

A discussion of this issue can be found here [drobe.co.uk].

IRIX was obviously going away.

[Medievalist]

SGI ported their graphics code to linux years ago, so that they could eliminate the cost of maintaining their own unix variant.

Even chkconfig reasonably standard in mainstream linux distros. IRIX is not worth the effort.

They can now concentrate on their core competency, which is presumably better graphics hardware than their competition.

I guess Erwin will have to start shopping for spare parts on ebay...

Re:Pick an OS with staying power

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an anonymous coward.. err.. don't really feel the need to create an account. But, as an SGI employee I can attest to Linux scaling very well on SGI. How about 1024 Itanium2 processors as a single system. No, this is not some cluster machine. One copy of linux runnuing on 1024p with many terabytes of memory.

Then there is a 4096 processor machine without manky infiniband interconnect or myrinet nonsense that you can run MPI programs against.

And if you really want a big cluster machine, how about 10240 processors addressable via MPI over infiniband.

Re:MIPS is going away?

[LWATCDR]

I will answer. None at all.
This announcement is about the end of MIPS as a server and workstation platform. The vast majority of CPUs are not used for server or workstations. They live in toasters, DVD players, digital cameras, microwaves, and so on. In the real world very few people ever write assembly programs that run on a server or a workstation. However in the embedded space assembly is still pretty common.
MIPS isn't dead. MIPS servers are dead. MIPS lives on in many devices.

Re:FOSS

[hackstraw]

I think they should release IRIX under the GPL and let the community maintain it!

I believe that is called Linux. SGI has already released bunches of IRIX to Linux including ccNUMA code and XFS and I'm sure other goodies as well.

Re:Why aren't they selling x86 and Linux?

[Animats]

They tried that. [computerworld.com] Didn't help.

SGI also tried making overpriced Windows desktops. [wikipedia.org] That also flopped. Nice cases, though.

Re:FOSS

[Paul Jakma]

I'm still waiting for opensolaris' complete sources to go through

See cvs.opensolaris.org [opensolaris.org]. Every bit that Sun can release has been released.

Re:PowerPC is superscalar. So is ARM

[Anonymous Coward]

Are any ARM implementations superscalar? XScale sure isn't.

XScale is a very old ARM implementation. Cortex A8 is indeed superscalar. http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM_Cortex-A8.htm l [arm.com]

Re:PowerPC is superscalar. ARM isn't.

[drinkypoo]

A judge also ordered that all their players get seized from a trade show.

Yes, based on a preliminary injunction, which is apparently quite easy to get in Germany. Their evidence has not actually been presented in court.

i.e. you lose.

Re:Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be FSN (http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html ) which has an open-source clone on SourceForge.
FSV: http://fsv.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]