Tooling for the RPI PIO design is probably a bit more accessible than the TI PRU situation. I'd say its not really a miss - more of a necessity given bennies' proclivity towards open/available tools. Getting access to architecture details of the TI PRU would necessitate an NDA, would it not?
> Getting access to architecture details of the TI PRU would necessitate an NDA, would it not?
Nope. All the information is right in the publicly available architecture manuals. However, you don't need to copy the PRUs, per se. All this can be done with RISC-V.
The important parts are deterministic execution, the register file sideload between paired processors, and, possibly, single cycle instruction execution. None of these are precluded by using RISC-V.
And, given how large his PIO stuff is, I'd argue it would be better to do this with RISC-V.
I was a young systems programmer in this decade, which were some of the most virulent of my life, and I had a lot of projects on Irix, particularly in Mountain View, necessitating my weekly flight from Burbank to San Jose for 3 days on site, porting and hacking and generally having a great ol' Irix time .. and oh, how I loved my trips into the SGI parts of town, the Birds of a Feather meetings discussing Irix vs. Linux (and SunOS and *BSD, oh no!), the flight simulator facility on the SGI campus where I would regularly get trounced by Air cadets in a matter of seconds .. the beautiful buildings that looked like they belonged under my desk or atop the Indy I had at home .. the confident air of the SGI engineers at lunch in the Oracle campus, the crazy ports of naughty things to naughty hardware (Netscape Navigator on Nintendo 64, oh my, how naughty you were, SGI!)
If only SGI had not made that Microsoft deal, had a bit more respect for their hardware engineers, and instead actually built a laptop to compete with Apples famed tiBook. Its one of my favourite alternative-universe daydreams .. what if the tiBook was an SGI tiBook, running Irix out of the gate .. would we have quite the Big Fruity Company dilemma we suffer today? What would an SGI iPhone have looked like?
Off to play some Tranquility and calm myself down a bit.
SGI creates a low power cpu for Apple to use in portable devices, eventually in desktops and laptops (no Arm).
And either:
SGI launches low budget PC with playstation 1 level 3d graphics as soon as they could compete with win3.1/95, running Irix.
Or:
A few years after that SGI launches what is essentially the Voodoo 2.
Any way you look at it the only possible future for SGI was low cost mass market devices. Just a matter of picking which one, they picked none.
Yes.. some interesting thoughts there, MIPS in my pocket: hell yeah.
The crazy thing is, SGI did have internal research projects to do such things .. they had engineers working on porting Netscape to the N64, which could very well have served as the basis for a more interesting consumer-end mass market device. Imagine if someone at SGI had put a cell modem in the mix somehow, yikes.
Well, its all a dream. Meanwhile I still have all my SGI gear, and I'm not afraid to admit I've been looking at 3DFX Voodoo cards on EBay a little more than I should have today ..
>Yes.. some interesting thoughts there, MIPS in my pocket: hell yeah.
The PSP, and twice, as it had an r3k interpreter/loader for PSX games.
Also, you can call me crazy, but I played Nethack under the PSP with the CFW mod setting the clock from 222MHZ to 50MHZ lasting the battery a few hours more...
The GCWZero was a MIPS console too, and pcsx-rearmed had optimisations for that too.
There have been a couple of GCWZero clones made in more recent years (e.g. from Anbernic) running the same (or a derivative) Linux-based OS with JZ4770 MIPS SoC and software compatibility. Too bad Ingenic never released any successor to the SoC though.
> the crazy ports of naughty things to naughty hardware (Netscape Navigator on Nintendo 64, oh my, how naughty you were, SGI!)
I remember in my youth when I first discovered Linux, soon after discovering that it ran on all sorts of architectures and starting to wonder how many of the computing devices I owned I could get running Linux.
The N64 and a Mac LC III were the only two I never managed to make it happen on. The idea of IRIX on one somehow never even crossed my mind, even though in hindsight it seems so obvious.
I read there was a plan to bring some kind of network platform to the N64, but I was completely unaware there was a port of Netscape to it -- and googling doesn't show anything either!
Do you have any more info? Is that something you ever had a copy of?
Fahrenheit was the end, as soon as that was the way forward, nothing happened except engineers went off to work for Nvidia, which nobody at SGI seemed to have a problem with.
You can't change a company that sells products for a minimum of £10K to a company that sells products for £2K, and the PC was just making the old business model impossible. Apart from anything else, there were some good tools on the PC, albeit MS Office and Adobe Photoshop. The situation was doomed when you didn't need SGI to do decent 3D. They never would have reinvented themselves for this age, sad to say.
> sells products for a minimum of £10K to a company that sells products for £2K
Well .. Apple ended up doing it. Why couldn't SGI? /s
Oh, I know why SGI couldn't do it: elitism. They were high on their own hubris for the latter part of the 90's when they should have been humbled by 3DS Max and Animation:Master eating their lunch .. and used that humility to build products that made people Think Different™ .. they already had a market doing just that, thinking differently to everyone else (who were bleating "Unix is dying, its gonna die, let it die!" at a fever pitch), but that market thought quite a bit too highly of themselves, methinks .. (I know, I was there, and I was one of them.. apart from the "Unix is dying" bit, I never once thought that since the day I had a MIPS RISC/os-based Magnum pizzabox plopped on my desk and was told to do something productive with it..)
Apple literally did that with MacOSX: Unix systems' geekdom from the A/V-media-writers' Mac UI background. You attracted both kinds of white collar jobs from college background. As it came with Xquartz, you could run old legacy software for GL at highers speeds... and hire a graphics expert inbetween to do fancy PDF's/images for the articles and the press releases.
GNU/Linux with KDE3 could have been close but sadly it was too fragmented. If not, well... imagine a full libre QT from the beginning, GTK no existing (no reason for GTK+/Gnome as KDE would have been good enough), automagic Motif converting code into QT at blazing speeds, and QT themselves releasing high quality C bindings. It could have been unstoppable, even more than Apple. No ESD vs ArtsD, Pipewire merging Pulse/ESD and the like would happened long ago. Kparts would left DBUS and COM/OLE in the dust. KHTML/Webkit would have been even far more powerful.
Fedora woudn´t be the reference distro, maybe Slackware with dependencies handled with Slapt-get and a nice GUI installer for newbies. A whole different world, where the smartphones would provice both an input interface... and a sliding keyboard.
As someone with a room full of SGI equipment which already runs Quake (and Doom, and Mektar and Tranquility), I can only say: this port to Voodoo on Irix needs to be done. ;)
There isn’t a Glide version of Quake. John Carmack didn’t want to do endless vendor specific API variants of Quake after an early Rendition Verite port burned him, so just released Glquake and said vendors should support standard APIs.
3DFX had a mantra of “no CAD” so didn’t support OpenGl, as they saw it as a primarily aimed at running CAD software etc. So therefore they had to come up with the somewhat hacky MiniGL to implement enough of OpenGL to get Quake to actually run.
That's because CAD graphics for games where a very different beast. NV Quadro cards would maintain far more objects being rendered but with slower FPS' as a CAD rendering wouldn't requiere real time FX with constant changes everywhere. If you have a look at GLIDE games the effects somehow look 'prettier' and the lights more 'alive'.
/u/sdz-mods - the person doing the 3DFX port to Irix - reported just now that they got MesaFX up and running and that'll serve as the basis of a "MiniGL" to get the port done. ;) So, there is hope!
.. except for where it does make sense, for example, you have applications that you want to deliver to MacOS, Linux and Windows users. Windows is less and less relevant these days - especially when one takes the bull by the horns and deliver cross-platform apps on purpose.
I'm unpacking my electric motorbike[1] and its moped sister[2] from winter storage and preparing them both for a summer in a city in a nation which energy supply is mostly renewables.
Of course, it took a lot of gasoline to get them here, but I sure as heck won't be using much gasoline to put them to solid use clocking up the kilometers, 100 at a time.
Got a few deals on solar panels for the backyard that'll get me completely off the grid for the most part, and from then on it'll be maintenance mode and solar powered travel as priority number one ..
I once worked for a mainstream headphone manufacturer who added a volume control to a product that was so widely despised that a special firmware release had to be done to disable it completely, or else the returns bin would overflow almost overnight ..
So this had me chuckling so hard, having worked professionally in the pro audio world for decades - I can say that some of these 'solutions' would actually be accepted in certain market segments .. I especially love the designs which use a built-in accelerometer.
It seems the good ol' knob is not going anywhere any time soon.
reply