SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 - Silicon Graphics Onyx RealityEngine²
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- Опубліковано 8 чер 2024
- An in-depth look at my Silicon Graphics Onyx RealityEngine², a $250,000 graphics supercomputer from 1993. Includes some history and background regarding the Onyx, a physical overview of the machine, a teardown and look at the hardware, and some games and demos.
TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - 2:01 Musical Introduction Segment
2:02 - 3:10 Spoken Introduction
3:11 - 5:16 Onyx Background Information
5:17 - 11:11 Physical Overview
11:12 - 17:13 Teardown and Hardware
17:14 - 19:27 Software, Demos, and Games
19:28 - 21:38 Spoken Outro
21:39 - 21:52 Standard Dodoid Outro
That RealityEngine paper: go.dodoid.net/realityenginepaper
IRIX.cc: irix.cc
Intro Song: AdhesiveWombat - Distortotron
-- Contact Me --
Please don't use any UA-cam contact features, I never read them. If you need to get in touch, please contact me on Reddit as a private message to /u/DodoDude700 or comment on one of my videos.
-- How I make my videos --
I use Final Cut Pro on my custom built Xeon E3 Hackintosh, and film with a Canon EOS 60D. I use a pair of large fluorescent studio lights for most of my work, but may use various other types if filming away from the room I usually film in. I have a really overfilled lab, which is usually where I dig up the tech seen in my videos.
-- ALL TRADEMARKS AND IMAGES BELONG TO THEIR RESPECTIVE OWNERS --
I do not claim to own any of the trademarks mentioned in my videos. Some images may be obtained from third party sources. If you need to contact me for legal reasons, please use one of the above contact methods.
-- Music --
The music used in the Dodoid and Dodoid Advent Calendar 2016 intros is AdhesiveWombat - Bombs. The music used in the Dodoid Advent Calendar 2017 intro is AdhesiveWombat - Tinybit. Other AdhesiveWombat songs are sometimes used. - Наука та технологія
I'm back!
4 AM here :)
It's been a while...
Perfect timing for me, breakfast telly. :D
10am vid nice :)
I just saw the notification in my e-mail and thought, "Oh nice, the SGI dude is back!" By the way, 20 minutes is relatively short. I've watched your SGI videos over and over, countless times, and in fact, after this, I'll probably head back and watch it again! Keep it up dude! You were missed.
He had to sell all his furniture and his shoes to pay for it.
Jordan Wharton , 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Nice
hilarious :D
Those shoes sold for 250k$ in the 90's
fede Those some big purple shoes, lol.
Wow what a crazy machine! Also, 16GB of RAM??? In 1993?? Holy balls...
Thats what i have XD
Amazing isnt it
I remember having around 300 mb of Ram
My gaming rig only has 8, I feel inferior ;-(
I only got 8 lol
8gb ddr3 or ddr4 is far superior to even 32 gb of the ram of that time
When buying a computer to last the next five years isn't good enough, and you want a machine that will last for the next twenty. :-P
"What kind of computer do you use?"
"A desk."
"A desktop?"
"No, a desk computer."
Technically it was a "deskside". You could wheel a desk up next to it to "extend your desktop".
I worked for SGI in the mid 90s at their Salford Quays office (Manchester UK). Best job I ever had. We all had an Indy on our desk and we had a very early email system called Z-Mail. It was the coolest place to work at the time and I was very lucky to get a job in pre-sales there. OpenGL, VRML, early HTML editor called Cosmo, we were years ahead. I still remember the day we got Quake running on an Onyx thanks to John Carmack's special port. We couldn't believe the smoothness and resolution. Then Nvidia came along.... Ah well it was fantastic whilst it lasted.
16 gb ram in the 90's is like sticking rocket boosters to a tricycle.
Lol... great analogy xD ... been there done it... in '92 I have even installed a 1-Gigabyte ($2,000) full height HD monstrosity to my tricycle, it was like a huge gas tank with afterburners... he-he
Not with that SGI. You just saw the Demo's
i dont got 16 gb or ram on my 5k imac
In 1993 my PC (my first one, a 80386) had 640KB of RAM and 20MB of harddrive.
Hell Yeah!!!!!!!!!
Wow.. that's a lot of computing power for 1993. Most machines were running around 25 to 66 mhz around that time with a single CPU.
And graphical power compared to XGA or even VGA graphics of the time
Hey, neat to see you here.
I know. In today terms what graphics cards would compare with the power it had?
Hi there! Yep, there's a reason it cost that much. It's a beast of a machine. I love your channel, by the way. Let me know if you ever want to do anything SGI-related in one of your videos. I'd be glad to help.
Mathcubes, that is actually not the easiest question to answer. The system is not just a graphics card equivalent. It would be a lot more comparable to a pc as a whole. The difficulty of comparing it to modern systems is that the chip architecture itself, and the way the parts and silicon are layed out on those pcb's, along with the os and software, are so much different than a pc. There are many chips on those boards that have been absorbed into other chips, or gotten rid of altogether. You can look at the storage, the ram, the speed and ipc of the processors, the different graphics processing engines, the caching schemes, the rasterization boards, and understand that they have all been condensed, miniaturized, and integrated into modern components. You would have to look up all those details in any given modern component, which can be hard to find sometimes, and then add up all the differences between them. Plus, many of the components that machine used, are not even used anymore, due to people figuring out simpler ways to do things with code.
I used this in work to design oil rigs in the 90s and produce one of the first fly through movies. Took a weekend to compile all of the frames. Brought back memories. Thank you.
yea back then it was a time restrictor,....but today my 6yo could do it on his nerf tablet in aboult 5min
sure nice made up story 😂 just trying to get likes, how sad
@@GrandMasterKai It’s a pretty plausible story. How the heck do you know?
Gotta love that compile time.
@@GrandMasterKai damn man you're so smart. Must suck knowing you know best all the time!
"What did it cost?"
"Everything"
hahahaha
hahahahaha funny one
ua-cam.com/video/ehcp_lI5CAc/v-deo.html&t=55
You know your pc is serious when you need a key to boot
Hahahaha
You know the OP is a millennial when he doesn't know that ALL computers had keys at one time.
thetedmang its a Joke bro
@@ghostjaeger4326 Shut the fuck up
@@ghostjaeger4326 We live in a post joke society now grandpa
That moment when a computer from 1993 has twice as much ram as your pc from 2017
Emufasar but prob Cost like 249,500 more
you wrote that in 2k18...
@@ashtenlastname4045 He probably built/bought his PC in 2017
Pomponivs Archibald yes I built it in 2017
That's over 400k with inflation so I don't doubt it lol
Man, this takes me back. Working at SGI was the most fun job I ever had.
Any cool stories/memories from your time there? That's so cool... :)
SGI's were awesome in their day! As an artist & animator, not only did the 64-bit processor 's kick the shit out of Intel/Windows 32-bit options at the time, but the whole SGI Operating System was designed for artists to work in a specialized graphics-oriented environment. The File Manager was basically an image management application in its own right. Still, having to run several of these (not to mention the refrigerator-sized Onyx Reality Engine series) was way to expensive for anything except feature film work or scientific visualization.
Imagine spending $250,000 on a Computer and not being able to play Crysis.
İbne Piçin Tekiyim That’s because crysis came out in 2007
@@ahgagf9902 HOLY SHIT! SERIOUSLY?
try something new and creative.
@@siralfrednobel Your wish is my command!
@@kos4225 go learn some fucking English before you correct someone.
Imagine a 250.000$ computer today.
It would have 16 TB Ram
sry 3tb for 250k maybe 250k for 16tb will be a great deal before 2018 end r/dreamer
@Nederlandse Uploads open chrome with 10 tabs maybe
@@Chrixio that's not how it works......
Chrixio are you being serious?
Chrixio that’s not how it works...
imagine how powerful a 250,000 dollar supercomputer would be in 2020...
That's probably just the price of an Nvidia videocard, the way things are going.
@@nossy232323 rtx 6900 with 10% more performance for 200% more dollars = ez profit = super improved now play 4k at 70 fps not 60. Oh yea and raytracing with 12 fps cuz human eye cant see games that support raytracing.
quantum computer 😅
They are called Cisco computers lol. The motherboards they operate can support up to 2 terabytes of ram...
Michael Imray you could probably hack the government with that thing
15:50
That “thick pink paper “ is anti-grounding insulation. Helps prevent static grounding in case of a close contact.
Yeah, SGI used that in several systems. In early versions of the Power Indigo 2 (R8000 version), it got so hot that the paper would smoulder. They had to respin the processor module to fix this. But that was SGI: already releasing hardware before it was actually finished. "Throw it over the wall, let support fix it."
@@ianf123 Vulcanized paper.
As an SGI tech support employee from 1997 to 1999, I was trained on the hardware and software side of these systems and their kin, some of which could fill an entire server room. The owners of SGI machines were primarily Hollywood studios, game developers, University research centers, NASA and the U.S. national laboratories. They did run games (BZFLAG) and VR (DACTYL NIGHTMARE), all of which are primitive by today's standards. OpenGL (gfx api) and Irix (OS) were as ahead of their time as the hardware itself. SGI also owned Cray, who's supercomputers were liquid cooled, and exponentially more expensive. In 1999 I showed the 640x480, $200 Sega Dreamcast to one of my SGI engineers (also the first person to excitedly show me Google) and his complaint was that it didn't do Anti-Aliasing. Granted the Onyx was leaps and bounds ahead of anything else graphically, but the price to performance ratio eventually caught up to SGI, and the company didn't change fast enough to stay ahead of the market. RIP. Google now occupies the former SGI HQ.
Epic, info David, what where you most recently working on.
You know since the biggest tech companies live in Silicon Valley, I aways wondered what happened to Silicon Graphics and I think I know now
Yeah I used to work in one of the old SGI buildings that had super low cable trays... SGI definitely didn't think that server racks/rooms would get as tall as they have.
Ahhhh the gool ol' days. We used to eat lunch in the lab (when no one was around of course), sitting on our really expensive "red couch" (Y-MP8) updating UNICOS by hand and sometimes dragging over an Indigo workstation and marveling at the ability to "spin the corvette" in real time or watch the paper airplane demo everyone was so fascinated by. I miss those days. I printed one of those Cray Y-MP mini cases for one of my Raspberry Pi Zero's. Fitting, considering the computing power of both. Cool, but at the same time sad.
David H., I remember your name. :D Spot on about the guy's comment re lack of AA on the Dreamcast, ironically I didn't like the PS1 for the same reason (terrible textures and wobbly geometry); I loved the N64, even though the AA still wasn't there, but the mipmapping was way better. However, the fact that the guy's immediate response was to note the lack of fidelity kinda foreshadowed where SGI went wrong eventually, they focused so much on image quality while ignoring demands for better basic raw performance.
Dang he legit sold everything in his house to buy the pc.
Quality commenting 👌
200000$ in house decorations means you are beyond rich. Maybe a billionaire. Most people don't even have 100000$ so 250000$ in decorations would be insane. Most people also only have 2000 - 5000$ of furniture in their house
@@nickypass861 whoooosh
Esskay you would expect someone with the suicide emoji to be funny ;-;
poor guy even lost his socks :)
I was 17 years old working as a level designer using this machine to build N64 games in 1996. From Dpaint to this was amazing. Happy days. Thanks for the great video. X
5:58 What I really admire about the Oynx is how quiet it is. I'd only slightly notice it when practising the drums in a small reflective room along to Megadeth booming from my Rokit 5s at 110dB.
so like 25 years from now they are gonna look back at our quantum computer prototypes and laugh while watching the video on their quantum smartphones with 16TB ram
@@kentinousss6 man that's crazy 😂
@@kentinousss6 something like this ua-cam.com/video/YJg02ivYzSs/v-deo.html
Actually, we're going to go down in personal computing power, and moving towards faster internet, using cloud servers for computing power. Kind of a shame if you ask me.
there won't be RAM, there will just be storage. Non-volatile memory is the future, and what better way to do it than make the entire storage device double as memory?
16TB RAM? wtf lol
I don't know how I got here and why I watched the whole thing but it was very interesting and I don't regret it.
Son Goku So you've cheated on Chichi with Kefla
It's very interesting, hard to believe this was a commercial machine, way back then
Sane here
Thanks for bringing back old memories! I used all sorts of SGIs in those times for computer animation and I loved them. System administration on IRIX was a joy compared to Windows nowadays and even if everything was slower than now, we had much more fun at work. It's great to see that here are still enthusiasts keeping these machines alive!
I used to go to Comdex and stand at the SGI booth with an aching heart. Years later when companies were unloading them, I got my own Indigo with software. It has been idle for a while but I am putting it back into commission. It will be so sweet to hear the startup chimes again.
That logo takes me back. My last CRT monitor was a 21" Silicon Graphics tube.
I worked with this machine and its relatives back in the late 80s and early 90s. Actually took a week long maintenance class at the SGI facility in Mountain View, CA. I have had that front ramp down so many times I hate to count. And usually had several people breathing down my neck asking how much longer it would be. Mostly, the machine just ran. Too bad SGI stopped innovating. I really liked their stuff. Thanks for the video. I am amazed at how much you know about this thing. It brought back a lot of memories.
.
I'm sure the repair bill was expensive lol
Back in the late 80's early 90's the Commodore Amiga had similar graphics capabilities for a fraction of the cost... ahhh the good 'ol days.. :)
The Amiga was definitely ahead of it's time and a great machine but the capabilities of AGA versus this is really not much a comparison, for obvious reasons.
Well yeah, but the Amiga's price was just a fraction of an SGI, and while a stock machine couldn't do hi-res real-time ray-tracing, there were programs which took overnight to render it. Later on they had a bunch of turbo-cards and AAA (Amiga Advanced Architecture) graphics which were able to do it in real-time. They were obviously in different leagues (including price), but the Amiga was the closest competitor to SGI, while the PC couldn't even touch it at that time... sure that has changed too by the mid 90's ;)
That's not a computer. That's a space station.
what do you mean, it's to big to be a space..……...
But space itself is big... reeealy big ;)
and yet, it just pales in comparison to my £1300 2017 gaming pc..... its just so many leagues behind
@jolena auvuya < Your 2017 system may be more powerful, but this was 25 years ago when the internet was in its infancy, that's the whole point of this video.
This is actually quite funny, the first space flights had on-board computers comparable to pocket calculators!
Is there a word for someone who feels nostalgia for something before their time? This guy is doing great things.
That was a real serious monster of a machine in 1993. Well done for picking one up and looking after it!
16 GB of RAM. In the 1990s. h o l y s h - -
Exactly, I remember being very excited about upgrading from 2 to 4 MB of RAM! Running 3D Studio for DOS! Being amazed the first time I pusged open on a CD drawer! LOL
In those days my AMD 486DX ran at 66MHz and only had 4Mbyte of RAM and a wooping 210Mbyte hard drive.
and 12 years later in 2005 my pc had 64mb ram while this one can have 16gb...
thats RAD dude!!!
Even my laptop has half the RAM....so unfair...
90s 16gb ram?
I want to know 2018 supercomputer, is it has terabyte ram?
A cray XC50 can squeeze up to 256GB per machine.
Actually yes about 3 to 12 terabytes
A common server with Xeon CPUs with the size a bit bigger than gaming PC, can have 2tb of ram, 8 graphic cards, and lots of hard disks.
Currently, the fastest PC in the world "OLCF-4" has 10,000 terabytes of DDR4 RAM or just 10 petabytes
@@davaymyaso7816 what process could utilize anything near that?
don't worry, that pc is big enough for him to move into if need be.
I think this video singlehandedly made a lot of people realize how cool SGI's workstations actually are.
Little known fact. Terminator Two was done on a SGi machine. The famous scene where the liquid terminator morphs out of the floor.
Most movies from that era used SGIs, it was the main platform for IFFFS apps. Star Trek VI, The Abyss, The English Patient, Jurassic Park, the list is very long. Personally, I helped a bit with the productions for JP2 Lost World and SW Ep. II.
mapesdhs Oh wow, that is so cool Man I LOVE these machines!
+angjoysnow:
They probably film the scene, import it to the SGI computer.
Then design the 3D models. Add the textures. Do the animation. Render the animation on top of the film and export it back out to VHS or something.
I heard that for Jurassic Park, the modelling software used was SoftImage.
They call such software CAM = Computer Aided Modeling.
Whoosh.
Its a widely known fact lmao. Jurassic Park as well. Hell Donkey Kong Country sprites were made on this thing, then pre rendered for the SNES to handle.
I love how it basically has a startup sequence, like a dragster.
The Obsolete Geek Its nice see you in here
More like a Jet if you Account for the Sound! lol
Obsolete Geek Nice to see you
Don't all computers have a startup sequence?
@@MMedic23 Yea, it's just not as apparent as it is in older hardware like this. Some server computers still start in similar fashion. Such as a lcd with post messages and such. Otherwise most computers start up so quickly now days it's as if they no longer have a startup sequence!
Your video was really good, It was a time machine back to the days of the computing super expensive devices. Thank you for all the efforts.
If they could do that in 1993, imagine what we could do now for the same price in 2019. Now that’s something to think about.
Nasa pc
Engineering + time = money?
pixar... thats what we do in 2019
The boring answer is probably that you'd buy a decent enough workstation for < $10k and spend the rest on rendering servers. A rack full of high-spec x86-64 servers isn't as _cool_, but it's a lot of computing power.
Fun Fact:
This exact workstation was used to create Nintendo 64 games when Silicon Graphics partnered up with Nintendo.
Know if it created OoT?
The Onyx was much more powerful than the N64, meaning most games had to be downgraded in order to run on it. Some games like Mario 64 were made on their Indie workstation, which closely matched the N64's power.
@@michaelopnv634 i'm saying n64 games were designed using the onyx
@@Tinnesa i'm not sure, but the most popular game it created was super mario 64 and also pilot wings
He literally said that in the video -.-
I feel like this dude watches Doug DeMuro
*T H I S*
Maybe. He's at least 1 t-shirt short.
Hahaha. I thought the same thing
Wheres the doug score though
Why is doug everywhere i go lmfao
6:10 Apple: "Let's do that, but worse."
Holy cow man the amount of nostalgia the intro gave me was insane !
I actually used one of these when they first came out. The company that I worked for bought it to do analysis on plastic parts. The spinning jet and the buttons brought back a lot of old memories!
I used one as well for special effects in a post production studio. Was state of the art in its day and the suite was something like $750 per hour to clients...
16
gigabytes of
RAM
In 1993
My PC has half of that
It's incredibly slow RAM though.
Baffled
skeletonboi faster than what you have
@Zack Burkhart nope. Current standart for ddr3 is 1600MHz and 2666MHz for DDR4. DDR4 is coming up right now with >4000MHz.
Back these days the ram was at a few 10 or 100 of MHz but i dont hv Numbers.
was it SDRAM?
Thank you so much for the time stamps. I wish more people did this, so helpful.
Good to see new blood with so much enthusiasm towards really geeky stuff. Thanks for finally bringing me up to speed on Silicon graphics, three decades after we used it as a milestone in computing in our vocabulary as little geeks.
Milestone then . . . Millstone now!
But can it run Crysis?
But can it run Crysis?
Can it run it Crysis 2?
But can it djent?
But.
But wait, can it run Fortnite?? lol
Back in the day i used to talk to my friend about how 500Mhz PC's were going to be to much to handle for humans
Turns out you were right
Cyka blyat 8ghz
LMFAOOOO
640kb is enough for everyone 😉
Watches on phone with over 2 ghz
Thanks for making this Dodoid! You're understanding of "how we got here" will give you a great perspective on today's technology. I sold many of these and Onyx 2's - Larger systems to run simulators and VR Caves. A few systems were in the millions - I worked at Apple in 1988-1993 and then to SGI. It was a great place! IRIX and MIPS forever!
Legend has it he's now paying off he's parents credit card in 2019.
Replacing all the furniture he sold too
Hey bro let's do a lan party!
"Sure man, lemme grab a uhaul!"
Flatl1ne you could always portfoward : ]
Fun thing is: I did lan parties with SGI machines. in the 1990s I worked for SGI Germany and every now and then friends and I met in the office to play some rounds of BZFlag.
I was in my 30s in the 90s. I was a programmer for companies like Control Data and Scientific Games. I remember SGI had a stellar reputation for graphics, and I think they also did some custom rendering for movies, too. Also, after I saw Super Mario 64 running on the display Nintendo 64 at Target, I had to have one. Pretty neat how SGI more or less introduced 3D super-computing power to the masses. Very nice video! You have an impressive knowledge of this machine. I'm glad someone like you is around to look after it. I have subscribed. All good wishes.
I think SGI Workstations were the PRIMARY systems for CG in movies during the 90's, until the move to more proprietary systems.
Did you make any slot games at Scientific Games or were they into other things back then?
Sorry, Tehf. I misspoke. I meant to say Software Sciences International. I confused the two because the were in buildings close to each other and in my memory, I just picked the wrong one. It's been a long time. At ssi, we programmed in 8080 assembly language for projects like Hospital supply inventories. I have a friend who works at Scientific Games now, and it's mostly slot machines and video gambling machines. I don't know what else they do.
An excellent review video. I’m very impressed with your presentation style.
Keep up the good work!
The best video I have seen yet on an SGI workstation - especially taking it apart and showing how vastly proprietary that system really was - the good ol days of computers - you know, when they were fun. SGI blazed the paths for CGI that’s so commonly used today.
When I was getting my CS degree I saw these machines and at the time it was incredible. I hope you appreciate what you've got there and how jealous I am. To me it's one of the coolest things to see young people appreciating old school tech, especially sgi, which was absolutely unreal at the time. You do a great job on these videos but you dish out info like a machine gun. Amazing work. Even though an Onyx is completely impractical, I would love to have one to play with. Glad you got one and an can fathom what it meant to people like myself at the time. I would like to see a video of how you repaired it and got it running, you're an amazing kid to even want to do that.
*Here I am in 2019, still using an 2nd gen core2duo with 2GB ddr3 ram. Never felt so poor before.*
Lol that's worth like £10
Hey man, i feel you. Im in the same boots and i feel you.
@@deadpixel_1614
That's still pretty good man. You should upgrade to core2quad. If possible upgrade to a lga775 g43 motherboard which supports ddr3 ram. DDR2 is too slow for gaming, it limits the total performance.
Just patiently save money bit by bit, you can upgrade it eventually
I've got a core2quad Q6600,3gb ddr2 and Gt 710
1.5m views and only 20k subscribers. you deserver more!
Because the title is appealing and the vid is not so great.
He doesn't
The thing is so big, you can even use it as your desk xD
Hebis using it to keep is cathode ray monitor though
he can use it as a space heater as well
or it can be use for breakfast table
The year this came out my family got our first computer. It was a 33mhz processor 486 with a 250mb hard drive and 2mb of ram. You had to bypass the windows 3.1 startup to play DOOM. My mom saw it on TV and bought it for $2,000 because they had the Britannica eycyclopedia CD and showed 144p videos of whales on it. Gas was only 78 cents a gallon that summer. Freakin birthday cards these days have chips with more processing power in them.
Haha same here, I had the 25 mhz 386 and I ran doom on it.
I actually had a 100Mhz overclocked CPU back in '93, with a ton of heat-sink on top of it, and an Orchid "high-end" video card... I remember it cost me a fortune. xD
My first machine was a 486 dx 33 too xD Forgot how much RAM it had or storage (obviously not a lot by today's standards) but I do remember it having a 1mb cirrus logic video card too xD
lmao 144p video.
You needed 4 mb of RAM to play Doom.
Yeah, that's the oldest computer that I have ever seen that can hold up till today with 16GB of RAM.
@@SimonWoodburyForget gaming....
@@SimonWoodburyForget no. Gaming on a computer. Are you dense? Just because you don't need 16 gigs, doesn't mean no one else does
@@SimonWoodburyForget There are plenty of games that are CPU dependent that will hiccup if you use less than 8gb of ram.
Doubt its super slow ram...
I wonder if SGI had "kidneys" as an official payment method back then ;)
thank you for all the efford showing us this awesome machine from the past.
On the thumbnail: Oh, it’s just a little box.
0:11 : Awe sheeet!
I thought it was something like a Gamecube.... until the guy walked on with it! 😂
Darren Pearsall exactly 😂😂😂
It has more ram than my computer, and the graphics aren't the worst I've seen.
Really enjoyed that thank you, what an absolute beast that is, looking forward to more of your videos
Awesome video, dude! You are very articulate and you clearly know your hardware.
Fantastic video! I had the chance to closely see two Onyx stations in Monte-Carlo around cca 1996 and see one unassembled for troubleshooting. I was 16 at the time and still have the photos of me proudly posing next to the various system cards :)
Had no idea Doug Demuro reviewed computers too
I really enjoyed the quirks and features of this machine.
Christian Mcmillan haha I wish i didn’t get that or think it was funny
no one knows me :(
But he doesnt look like Doug to me
Better than hoovie
Silicon Graphics were THE dream machines back in the early 90's! They were years ahead of the pack. The first one I ever came across was in the Glasgow University physics department where my mate was given one for for his biophysics degree, for his research into 3D mapping of a fly's brain!
I would love to see that work, do you still have access to those files? What sofwaware will I need to even read those files? Since the computer is 25 years old
Brilliant vid, a rare insight into some very unusual i/o configurations
What cost $250,000 in 1993 would cost $438,700 in 2018.
except for around $600 today you could buy a PC that blows this out of the water
@@carfo You could buy an old laptop with hd4000 graphics for under £70 that would fuck this computers wife and steal its babies
Yeah, that's not how technology's prices go. They always go down with more features and time.
Captain Sparks you forget the cost of inflation and how computers don’t gain value when aged unless it’s a priceless piece of history... generally it’s not that much also inflation can contradict your statement...
Mr PumperKnuckles I think you missed the point. It has nothing to do with the cost of computers fluctuating. Say $300 could buy you a car in 1910, the value of the car doesn’t matter. The $300 car could be worthless today, but paying $300 in 1900 is the equivalent of paying $9,000 today. I’m bad at explaining unfortunately..
It's a UNIX system... I know this!
Alan: *The door locks! Ellie boot up the door locks!*
Michael Hansen Im going to check this out now
You got the like!!! Jajaja
I've seen indigo running same OS
Clever girl.
That's a Desk Side Onyx, they only came with 2-4 cpus. Full size Onyx looked like a refrigerator and had up to 24 cpus. I worked on both of these, including the Crimson when I was an intern at a VFX studio in 1995. Later that year, we beta-tested SoftImage 3D (owned by Microsoft at that point) which had just been released a Windows NT version. The PC of choice was from a company called Intergraph which had one of the most powerful graphics cards available for Windows NT at the time.
Side by side render speed comparison, the Intergraph machine was MUCH faster than the Crimson we had in the studio.
This was the beginning of the end for SGI, they never took the PC threat seriously and ended up coming to the PC market several years later with an expensive, unreliable workstation which I ended up using at another studio for a time. Within 10 years, SGIs disappeared from all the studios except for use with Flame, Inferno and Smoke. Which are high end compositing and VFX applications that relied on the SGIs hardware and super fast throughput. Eventually, they too migrated away from the SGIs and now run on souped up PC workstations instead.
This is indeed how the story went. We had a lot of Indy's , Challenges and later O2s in the office. I used to work for the european distributor of SGI so I got my hands on lots of thoses machines. Even had one at home. I used Newtek's Lightwave on it to try go get into 3D modelling.
I have no SGIs but I do regret selling my Indy. Never got into 3D professionally. But I am doing some modelling using Blender though on a Macbook Pro. It sucks at rendering though. Cool that you still own all those machines. I don't think my wife would have these lingering in the house ;-)
@@marander512 I started on the Amiga, first Imagine 3d, then Lightwave 1.0. I didn't even know they made an Irix version of Lightwave. Such an odd platform to port to at that time.
Also, SGI proprietry hardware doesn't help either. Where as you can run out to buy a generic mouse for the intergraph, you need to get back to the dealer to buy a simple mouse. Poweranimator was also the software of choice for these machines. Amazing that a Nvidia GTX now has more computing power on a PCIe bus than this behemoth. I was starting out with 3d and back then, 3dstudio ver 4 on ms dos was the main option for smaller studios.
Ah this brings back memories. I used to work at an oil company with a full size Onyx. It was used to load seismic data which was then projected onto a 180 degree screen. The geologists would manipulate the huge chunks of data to look for oil. At lunch, though, we would play Doom.
Wow, great teardown video. Thanks!
you're welcome
Got recommended this video randomly and ended up watching (and enjoying) several of your videos so had to hit the subscribe button; hope to see more from you soon!
18:12 when pluto was still a planet. RIP
it is still a planet
@@clashwithbat2283 It's a dwarf planet, which by definition is not the same as planet.
It is a planet right now
@@symphony137 no. It was brought back into the cathegory of planets
Fuck space. Waste of time
Duuude, you went far and beyond with research and documentation of this particular hardware, I must say. Wow, just wow. Keep up the good work, subbed!
This is my first time visiting your channel and I'm impressed! Unlike other UA-camrs who worry about style and their image (trying so hard to be cool)... Your you...T-shirt, shorts and barefoot! Immediately your focused on the product with no crazy jokes, wise cracks, bright graphics or gimmicks. Its nice to see someone who's not afraid to be who they are rather than someone they are not. On top of all of that your crazy smart and you explain yourself in a way that's not confusing, noisy or loud. The example you are setting for young people is one that I think everyone needs to see and share. Keep up the excellent work and thank you for giving me a channel that I can watch with my 13yr old nephew. He's just beginning to get into computers and he wants to be a UA-camr. I keep telling him that he doesn't have to have a gimmick or act like an idiot to get views. Some people have that charismatic, in your face attitude and that's great. Jacob however doesn't. Your channel can show him that you can most definitely get views without having to jump through hoops or be flashy... And he can (both of us can) learn something in the process.
Paragraphs! PARAGRAPHS! Dammit!
Nicely done man.
Oh man! I remember when I was so fascinated by everything SGI had on offer! This was a dream back then when ILM used to render Terminator 2 on such monsters... thanks for the video and memories! Subbed👍
Terminator 2 1991 😅
Couple of extra points worth noting:
- The rack system supports up to three gfx pipes (adding a 3rd requires an additional card cage and 3-phase power), for a total of up to 18 output channels.
- The Challenge server model, not having gfx, could support more CPUs, up to 36. The Onyx/Challenge racks I bought both had 24x R10K/195MHz (2MB).
- Performance of RE2 depends very much on the number of RMs installed, as do various features such as available pixel depths and video formats. Dodoid's system appears to have up to 2 RM4s, the range being 1, 2 or 4 per pipe, using either RM4 boards (4MB texture memory) or RM5s (16MB TRAM). The TRAM does not combine between RMs, whereas the VRAM does, which is 40MB per board.
- The default SCSI disks are HVD (High Voltage Differential, 20MB/sec), though the buses can be altered to run SE at 10MB/sec. Be very careful when working with such systems not to connect the wrong type of disk, or to the wrong connector.
Great effort: congratulations and thanks for the wonderful video
I would absolutely love seeing more of that cyberastronomy demo it just looks so cool
I'm a 40's architectural illustrator and i remember those really well, nobody could afford them unless you work for universal studios. lol. my humble setups were voodoo video cards from 3dfx Interactive, later Nvidia, running 3dmax from kinetics later Autodesk, nice video.
Yep, in the late 80's, early 90's I had a $5,000usd fully tricked out custom PC with an Orchid video card, 16MB DIMM ram, 1GB hard drive one of those full height 5.25' monstrosities which cost $2,500usd basically half price of the entire pc. Just imagine what would $5K buy you today ;) Nowadays we have 64GB to 256GB SDCards on smartphones in our pockets... talk about tech advancements.
How are you still alive?
soft drugs and beer wont kill you until you are in the 90's, long time to go yet.
My office had at least two onyx's that I remember, I used to use an O2 for my work and there were several indigos(?) and SunSparcs around too. The maintenance contracts for these things were 10s of thousands of dollars every year as well.
did own one. i restored her and sold her, plus, every time that i took it for a ride, park and walk away from it, when i was back, 10 guys taking selfies lying on top of the hood or begging for a ride. i have really bad social skills, you know....
The paper is a non-conductive barrier to prevent an accidental misalignment of a card, a component outside of spec, or conductive dust from contacting and shorting the card to the metal case. It's basically because the specs for the cards allow for components to possibly go all the way to the edge, and well, adding more to the case is way more then expensive then a sheet of "fish paper".
These and the bigger cabinet systems were pretty fun to play with and work on back in the 90's they powered a lot early VR research tools. And although annoying the keyboard design wasn't a big issue as most of the time you ran them headless, and just used the serial port to do base of tasks until networking was up.
fantastic clip, thank You!!
Great video. I love those old SGI systems and had the good fortune to work on them for part of my career.
What did you use them for? Always on the lookout for unusual historical uses of SGIs.
@@mapesdhs597 A few things, such as visualising seismic data and reservoir simulation (basically, computational fluid dynamics).
@@adam872 Excellent stuff! I helped sell an Onyx & Challenge rack set to a GIS company in Glasgow for exactly that kind of work. Years earlier I talked a fair bit with some oil company guys about such things, BP I think it was, also with Chevron in Nigeria (they had a POWER Onyx). Did you ever move up to the Origin type systems? Their better memory arch gave a big boost for CFD and similar codes. Hmm, are any of the SPECfp95 codes similar to CFD calculations? My SPEC95 comparison using the same CPU in different SGIs is here:
www.sgidepot.co.uk/r10kcomp.html
@@mapesdhs597 yep, definitely used Origin systems. We had one for running our software builds, as well as similar work to what I mentioned before. They were beasts for their time.
@@adam872 Certainly were! It's a shame though the CPU design density had been set for the TDP of IA64 (so SGI told me) as that meant a rack only took 16 CPUs; they didn't fix that until O3000 when it was finally the 128 per rack it should have been for MIPS. I bought an Onyx3800 in 2008 from SPI in CA, that was a laugh, though terrible timing re the effect of the economic splat on shipping costs (because everything was defined in USD):
gainos.org/~elf/sgi/nekonomicon/forum/3/16720350/1.html
I was always amused by SGI's system designs. Very colorful for the time when everything else was mainly beige or black.
That was a really great and informative video! I worked on an SGI Indy back in 1996 (Yes, I am old!) when I was a Animation student. I never knew what it looked like inside (Obviously, they were not going to let students peek inside such an expensive system.) At the time we used Soft Image as the 3D software. It was a great learning experience and I now teach 3D graphics and game development. Excellent work, I wish you much success with your channel, keep it up!
Wow. Very well done, both content and production. We had a similar one to this unit when I worked at Global Village in Mountain View in '93-'95 -- though my memory is that it had a more "art deco" purple front -- so probably not a $250K unit. Still, I remember playing with some of the demos you showed. (As for me, I was writing Motorola CISC code for an office communications server product on Sun SPARC workstations. Ugh!)
Nobody:
UA-cam: Time to learn about this hyperventilating brick!
Excellent job explaining this machine. I wish all UA-camrs were as good at getting to the point as this guy is.
But can it run crysis?
Hmm, very interesting to ponder what might be possible with a deskside IR system with a highly optimised engine, but it would need to be a complete rewrite to match the hw, no kind of port would be any good. IR can certainly run Quake2 and Quake3 pretty well, so who knows with decent coding. Huge differences though in what functions are support which would mean a lot of the visual effects in Crysis would have to be left behind, eg. SGI's gfx tech doesn't have pixel shaders, that hadn't been invented yet. Some of its staff moved to NVIDIA, took the IR base concept with them, removed all the stuff not needed for games, squased it onto a single board on a modern process size, voila the GF256 was born, the first PC GPU with a hw GE (it has the same GLperf specs as IR). SGI did argue internally at least once about making gaming consumer GPUs, but it didn't go anywhere, likely the resellers didn't want to have to deal with ordinary cheapo consumers and SGI bowed to that. Pity really as in theory a scalable product based on the RCP from the N64 would have been viable, but the whole Nintendo deal kinda soured as SGI failed to make much money once the console price went down, perhaps not realising that the real money in console gaming comes from the games sales, not the initial console sales.
Still, who knows, one could probably make something pretty cool, given how impressive some of the real-life apps and demos are for IR, but Crysis per se, no, that's just way too demanding. :D Love that game btw, still playing Warhead atm.
RE2 though, definitely not, it's just too old, even with RM5s. The GE speed and fill rate just aren't there for anything seriously detailed. Remember it's not just about triangles/sec either, eg. gaming hw has 3D functions such as 2-sided textures which pro hw doesn't need, all sorts of optimisations on one side or the other.
Ian.
+Kolja Wilms:
Nope.
Back in 1993, OpenGL was brand new. I think it was designed in 1992 or 1991 and it was competing with about 15 other 3D APIs. The great thing about OpenGL was that the specification was open. You can even downloading it today for the latest and greatest GL 4.5 (www.opengl.org).
This thing probably supports GL 1.1. There is no support for multitexturing. No vertex or fragment shaders. I imagine it can do hardware stencil buffer while most consumer gfx boards from 1995 to 2000 could not.
I think GL 1.2 came out in ~1998.
Shader support in the form of extensions came along after 2003 I think.
+James Fondren The only problem with that theory is that SGI created OpenGL
maybe with a resolution of 2x3 pixels
it will be a crisis when you try to.
17:22 Icon for Doom.
WHHHHY DID YOU NOT RUN THIS IN THE VIDEO?!
Because DOOM is for DOS and DOS emulation on these computers is super slow. There is probably solution, compile DOOM from source code files for unix.
@@MKVideoful SGI Doom is a proper, native, port, made by Id. Just software rendering, though.
@@MKVideoful Yeah SGI doom is its own thing and it runs fine, it just doesn't use the graphics hardware and doesn't look any better than Doom on any other platform. That's why I didn't show it.
@@Dodoid Maybe somebody can add light mapping, dynamic shadows just like Bisqwit do in his video, where he programmed doom renderer from scratch.
@@Dodoid The funny part is that the SGI port at 4x scaling to fill the screen is blatting 28x more pixels than the DOS version.
Great video, dude. Go ahead!
Ahh. Memories :) This was my development machine back then - we were doing a 4 channel sim with motion base. The price isnt quite right: Thats the "base" model.
Depending on what cards you purchased. You could buy:
RM Cards (Render Managers)
GU Cards (Graphics Units) - these were like GPUs but you needed good RMs to have good performance.
Memory Cards
And some video specialist cards (video in/out and channel managers/mixers).
Cards generally cost between 25-50K _each_ And with a decent setup you could have 250K of just cards :)
The SGI guys I dealt with here in Aus, were generally useless - they sold us very shit RM's and GU's and basically had a machine that was very poor in 3D performance for the machines abilities.
Once we replaced the RMs and received some great assistance from the US tech support, we were rocking. It was my first ever development in shaders (I wrote some rain, and snow shaders for the train sim) and posted solutions for particle rendering on Performer. Good times. Fond memories. Thanks for the video - its a very clean/nice example of a great machine.
Btw. Their memory and processor system actually became the industry standard, and is still used by Intel and AMD today :) .. The crossbar system was crazy, and awesome :)
How far ahead of consumer machines were these things? Assuming that the architecture was compatible, would you be able to run something with similar graphical fidelity to half life 2, from 2004, on it? The demos obviously aren't stretching the capabilities of the hardware, so I'm really curious what $250k would get you in 1993.
Do you still working on CGI today?
You didn't watch the video did you?
@@freddyli5356 yes still working with simulators in defence and AR and VR systems as well. Its been around 25years of electronics, PLC programming, games programming and simulation architecture. Some awesome experiences especially with SGI and the Onyx's bigger brother the Origin 3000 series. Good times :)
David Lannan yet you weren’t even born when this came out kid hahah
the T-Rex from Jurassic Park loves this video
Was thinking the same.
Arcadio? eres tú xD?
Fernando? XD
That´s where the T-Rex was made! IoI
Makes sense since SGI machines assisted with the VFX of that movie.
(you can see a Crimson in the movie itself!)
Good video man, that's quite the machine!
what an interesting computer man, thnx for the effort to show everyone :)
You see how warped that board was? Imagine that board being on the very end of the row, close to the side. The pink paper could have saved you a 2nd mortgage.
great post
I remember my friends and I being amazed at these things back in college in the mid 90s. The things they were claiming with these bordered on witchcraft at that time. So glad people like you are keeping the spirit of SGI alive.
I would love a full series of this, going through the most powerful computer from every few years, like the most powerful computer in 1996, 1999, and so on