I had a nice little SGI Indy that I inherited from work. Unfortunately I managed to drop a screwdriver on it when I had the case open (it was on at the time) and something went bang. We all make mistakes.

Irix was a nice Unix for its time.

Ouch!! There’s always Ian’s SGI Depot if your feeling a deep pang of nostalgia / in need of some last millennia raw compute talent 😅

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Do you recall SGI / Silicon Graphics from the early nineties? Universities and research institutes were also big buyers of them, just like the film and graphics industries. Then they slowly slid to oblivion in the noughties.

I remember them, never used one, but seen one in action. strange how times have changed, in the day it was a very powerful machine and yet now a home machine is better at what that machine did

They (along with lots of other specialist workstation makers) were always under pressure from commodity machines, which kept getting more powerful and cheaper. Strange to think those original machines are now 30 years old.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

In reply to a post by ian_c:

Just saw a price comparison.

Full specced Intel Mac Pro - $52,000
Fully specced M2 Ultra Mac Pro - $6,200 (with 16 more GPU cores that specced up Studio and starts at 32gb RAM, BTW)

I would imagine that Apple has listened carefully to the fairly niche market for these things and have studios=uly given the market what it asked for - pci slots.

A fully decked out M2 Ultra Mac Studio (24‑core CPU, 76‑core GPU, 32‑core Neural Engine, 192GB unified memory, 8TB SSD storage) is £8,999 here.

A fully decked out M2 Ultra Mac Pro with the same spec as above is £11,999. You also get a Magic Keyboard and Mouse for that price.

So the real delta is more like £2,700 between the two. So basically a chassis that can take six PCIe Gen 4 slots, has an extra 10 GbE port, an extra HDMI port and 2 more Thunderbolt-4 ports.

Target audiences for an M2-based Mac Pro…or something

https://youtu.be/naeTkt21S6w