Hacker News Reader

Comment by puzzle | Hacker News Reader

Probably nowhere. :-( MIPS was, almost twenty years ago, perhaps the first architecture that had 64-bit capable chips you could power with two AAA batteries (along with RAM, a screen and the rest of the system). Talk about squandered opportunities! For some reason, it was all downhill after the PS2/PSP.

View on HN

That reason is ARM, they just crushed everyone with their business model even though they weren't best at anything.

What was unique about their business model? Licensing their hardware/software?

I don't think it was unique, just that MIPS, PowerPC and the other players at the time were linked to large companies that were not as good at working with everyone and anyone who wanted to use their cores.

>I don't think it was unique, just that MIPS, PowerPC and the other players at the time were linked to large companies that were not as good at working with everyone and anyone who wanted to use their cores.

The no. 1 reason ARM went ahead

When I said "for some reason", I was trying not to go into speculation. But yeah, ARM definitely attacked them in the embedded market from the lower end. And Motorola, transitioning from 68k to PPC, from the high end (PPC was very popular for laser printers, for example), later joined by IBM (Cell/Xenon). We all know what happened to SGI in the server/workstation market.

SGI also have themselves to blame when they decided to be just yet another hardware vendor selling Linux/Windows systems.

I'm not understanding your comment. Weren't they always just that - a hardware vendor? I think they had some image editing stuff that only ran on their boxes but didn't they still essentially make their money on the high end hardware needed to run those programs?

All commercial UNIX vendors were hardware vendors.

What made them special is how they combined their hardware with their own version version of UNIX.

Hence why even trying to write portable code across UNIXEs wasn't as easy as many believe.

Irix had IrisGL, Iris Inventor, XFS and a few other goodies, before they became the Open variants.

SGI was also a big sponsor of the C++ STL work.

Twenty different vendors combined their hardware with their own version of Unix. There was nothing special about that.

Sure there was, the vertical integration and overall user experience.

With the end of Moore's Law, are we returning to vertically integrated hardware+software?

Domain Specific Architecture talk by Hennessy & Patterson, 2018 talk for 2017 Turing Award: http://iscaconf.org/isca2018/docs/HennessyPattersonTuringLec...

I will watch the talk later.

However I can say yes, we are returning to those days.

Thanks to the thin razor margins you see OEMs now selling un-upgradable phones, laptops, tablets, 2-1, leaving the old desktop PC for a niche market that gets smaller every year, mostly targeted at gamers.

Also OEMs got envious of Apple as the surviving icon of those days, all of them want to be Apple of their market and sell experiences.

How did that make them different than all the other vendors that had their own hardware and versions of UNIX at the time - HPUX, Solaris, DEC etc?

SGI abandoned MIPS and IRIX, because there was no longer any economical reason to maintain them - x86 was faster and cheaper, and Windows was much more popular than Unix. SGI's main strenght was GPUs, not workstations.

Where are those GPUs now?

Nvidia. That's where a lot of the SGI engineers went to work.

And that's largely because SGI figured it way too late.

>That reason is ARM, they just crushed everyone with their business model even though they weren't best at anything.

Not business model per-se, but not being crippled by pointy hair boss types from C-levels to lowest level managers.

Second to that what got them ahead was their lack of greed and ambition.

Few people who had firsthand experience with buying IC IP licenses I know tell of MIPS 10 years ago as "we will not simply sell you a core, but force feed you all peripherals, and make you pay for 20 more licenses for god know what along the way." Compare it to ARM where you wire money today and get a guy coming to your office to drop off harddrives with netlists a week after.

For support, documentation, software, and everything else ARM was light years ahead.

Crazy to think about the range of devices the architecture supported, from small battery-powered things to giant multi-rack SGI Onyx machines.

I'm still impressed with my dual-R12000 Octane today.

>"MIPS was, almost twenty years ago, perhaps the first architecture that had 64-bit capable chips you could power with two AAA batteries"

Is this a specific reference? What device would that be?

Yes, I mention it above. It's an Agenda VR3, a Linux PDA from 2001. I still have one of those. The CPU is from 2000.

Which system are you talking about? The PSP was 32 bit IIRC.

The Linux Agenda VR3 ran on two AAA batteries and used a 66MHz NEC VR4181. That's a 32/64bit MIPSIII chip. The VR3 only used it in 32bit mode, but you could take over the system and enable 64bit mode. It was little-endian only, unfortunately.

Neat!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com