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Comment by FarmerPotato

2 days ago

I used a Cray C-90 and T3D 256-core machine from 1995-1999. The T3D used commodity Alpha 21164, and was already behind the T3E when we got it (Cray refurbished.) By the end it was outclassed by an SGI Oxygen box with 8 CPUs. I’d already ported a lot of software from SunOS and HP-UX to Irix and Unicos (Cray) and it was easy to move it to Linux in the end.

You means SGI onyx? The cool looking purple one?

  • IIRC the desk side onyx had the royal purple stripes and only accepted one CPU board, the rack mount version were that blue-purple color, more indigo (color)

    • So there were two computers made with the same bits mid 90s. Origin(compute, blue) and onyx(graphics, purple). Both had deskside and rack systems.

      Onyx had a few slots reserved for graphics, original could have more compute boards. But you could certainly put two couple cpu boards in an onyx deskside or rack.

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