&quot;I preferred Silicon Graphics hardware back then, the user interface was as cool and responsive as it gets rather than the juddery OpenLook effort the Sun machines had.&quot;<p>Bro, Silicon Graphics was the shit! I was studying games, AI, and supercomputing back then. Their Octane workstations with dual 200MHz MIPS plus innovative graphics were totally smoking nearly GHz Intel rigs. The NUMAlinks on Origin were giving 100+GB of RAM, dozens of CPU&#x27;s, and GB&#x2F;s bandwidth at microsecond latencies. They threw a room full of Onyx2 NUMA&#x27;s together to blow our minds with [the graphics of] Final Fantasy. They later put FPGA&#x27;s (&quot;RASC&quot;) on NUMAlink in Altix machines to show what FPGA&#x27;s could <i>really do</i> as accelerators if PCI bottleneck wasn&#x27;t there. Anything those people did was mind-blowing for a time.<p>Their legacy lives on in XFS, the NUMA extensions to Linux, that mainstream graphics adopted similar interconnect strategy, and that Intel&#x27;s about to one-up their FPGA scheme with Altera acquisition. Not a bad list. I want them to spin off an older NUMAlink chip as a commodity for building x86 NUMA&#x27;s. I still want me a MPP system with single-system image and hundreds of GB RAM on the cheap. It&#x27;s 2015 but my 1990&#x27;s dream still hasn&#x27;t come true. Getting closer.<p>&quot;InfiniteReality&quot;<p>You mean this bad boy?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Z45nbzMLk98" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Z45nbzMLk98</a><p>Btw, here&#x27;s the two architectures they used if you were interested in technical aspects. It&#x27;s so out of date that a FOSS GPU should be able to copy it with low patent risk. Improving it would make a nice MS or PhD for academics.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.cmu.edu&#x2F;afs&#x2F;cs.cmu.edu&#x2F;academic&#x2F;class&#x2F;15869-f11&#x2F;www&#x2F;readings&#x2F;kilgard97_realizinggl.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.cmu.edu&#x2F;afs&#x2F;cs.cmu.edu&#x2F;academic&#x2F;class&#x2F;15869-f...</a><p>&quot;Yet would anyone want the 256Mb PI when there is the 512 Mb version?&quot;<p>Based on what I&#x27;ve read, anyone trying to give them muscle should go for 512MB as the 256MB is giving many commenters hell. Just too little memory. However, people doing things that aren&#x27;t memory intensively, esp embedded, might be fine with a fraction of Pi&#x27;s resources. Remember that even 8-bit CPU&#x27;s still sell around $10 <i>billion</i> a year at prices under a few bucks each. That&#x27;s a <i>lot</i> of applications and units.<p>Meanwhile, anyone wanting an SGI-style experience today will need a combo of high-end CPU&#x27;s, GPU&#x27;s, and FPGA&#x27;s. Pico Computing&#x27;s desktops seem to fit the bill. I&#x27;m saving up for one. :)<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;picocomputing.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;picocube&#x2F;picomini&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;picocomputing.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;picocube&#x2F;picomini&#x2F;</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;picocomputing.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;hpc-systems&#x2F;sc6-4u&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;picocomputing.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;hpc-systems&#x2F;sc6-4u&#x2F;</a>