[rescue] SGI O2 Rescue

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Fri, 12 Sep 2003, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:

> Are you sure about that?  I hadn't heard of the R10ks being flaky doing
> texturing.  I had heard of them being flaky doing anything with the AV
> module, if he has that.

I think they're two separate problems, one of which has a patch.  SGI
didn't make very many R10k O2s, for all the problems they had with them
in the hands of their target audience.

> The R10ks should be able to handle a fair amount of CPU work.  Not as
> much as an Octane, but still a nice amount.  It just has an unreasonably
> high memory latency, suposedly because of how they attached it to the
> bus.

Yep.  Memory sits on PCI in the O2.  I don't think the CPU has a special
path, either.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> and was running enlightenment and I couldn't change that.

Enlightenment on an SGI?  That's really, really disgusting.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke   )  "Gamer weenies...are the sludge at the bottom
Elgin, TX          (    of the user swamp."           --Gary Nichols