Meet the SGI Octane - A 3D Graphics Powerhouse from 1997

[Music] our MC is supported by monster joysticks calm level up your retro gaming with their joysticks feature in genuine SanMar arcade paths and one click print calm for your photos on canvas acrylic gifts and more local craftsman and global delivery ello cave dwellers welcome to the cave we finally have some SGI hardware down here and weighing in at 25 kilograms I can tell you it was no small task lugging it down the steps into the cave but it's here and it's the creation of SGI a company that was founded in California in 1981 where founder Jim Clark's vision was to create the most powerful 3d workstation hardware money could buy this particular model the octane was available from 1997 through to 2000 and then they octane to for a few years more but not long after the turn of the millennium SGI began to explore the creation of intel cpu based machines and shifted their focus to supercomputing over 3d graphics workstations unsuccessfully I might add it's not their last model but it's certainly one of the later models designed specifically to hit that brief of being a powerful 3d workstation Hardware before their focus shifted elsewhere so that for me makes it an extremely exciting prospect to tear down to get to know and to try and understand better it's all thanks to cave dweller Kai so join me in thanking Kai for donating the machine to the cave for us to look at today and I think we'll begin by trying to understand exactly what this was used for and what it can do when in the right hands we don't have time to horse around we don't have time to use toys instead of tools we have to buy the best available tools for these people and every time we look it comes out SGI and we love octane it's very easy to use and it's doing a lot to change the way we do business here and it is years ahead of the competition there's nobody else out there that has this tool available as an engineer we need a high performance workstation so we can run more iterations of analysis on larger models so we can optimize our design faster among other people Steve Jobs then popping up there as he became a majority shareholder of Pixar in the 80s hence his appearance and Pixar made heavy use of our obtain on projects such as Toy Story 2 released in 1999 final rendering of the movie would of course be completed by a farm of high-end SGI servers but the modeling and creation of the movie was completed on Octane's which talked to those servers apparently at one point in the movie's creation a single octane at Pixar became known as the million dollar machine after the Toy Story 2 folder structure was accidentally erased and Pixar's backups were found not to have been working correctly luckily the supervising technical director had an octane at home which held a full and nearly up-to-date copy of the entire movie that machine was very carefully collected and returned to Pixar HQ to save the movie and thousands of man-hours of work I digress however Toy Story 2 is just one of many examples of movies created using SGI hardware Ice Age Lord of the Rings and The Matrix are others which specifically utilized our octane and on older SGI models credits include Jurassic Park which not only created the dinosaurs but also cast the hardware in the movie [Music] as well as The Mummy terminated to starship troopers Star Wars Episode one Shrek twister ants and the abyss in 1988 the list of movies SGI played a part in is a long one indeed so you get the idea then on Mean Green Machine was at the forefront of 3d animation and computer graphics being used in the movies that we all know and love more quietly behind the scenes it was being used for intensive computer aided design simulation modeling and well anything mathematically intensive really for those with the budget to afford one at the time of release January 1997 SGI held 70% of the 3d workstation market so clearly those with the influence and those who were decision making in those industries considered that the price tag was worth it for these machines but just what was that price tag for an octane and specifically for the octane on the table here today [Music] well the price would vary a lot depending on what options be found inside but the very very cheapest octane retailed at around 20,000 US dollars here in the UK allowing for inflation that's about 21 thousand pounds but that's the very basic system this particular system I'm told was originally purchased for 70,000 pounds and that's with educational pricing discounts without them I'm told it would cost over a hundred thousand pounds so this is by far the most expensive system I've played Du Monde to date we will of course come on to the operating system and more software but first let's get familiar with the hardware and find out why it commanded such a price tag and if we can better understand why SGI garnered the reputation that it did for producing the 3d workstations to own [Music] aesthetically this is an incredibly striking machine SGI machines were quickly identifiable for their unusual shapes and bold colors in a world of boxy beige pcs the early Octane's like this model have that Carm in green skin with the SGI cube logo later revisions updated the logo in keeping with SGI sorry branding and then its successor the octane 2 has the same case but it's blue in color peeking through the carefully modelled fins perhaps even modeled using SGI hardware itself we can see a metal honeycomb heat dissipation an important aspect of the design has very long periods of rendering with CPU and video hardware running at 100% would not be an unusual task this hinged door swings open to reveal a ventilation grid and unoccupied option drive phase reset is recessed so you need to poke something in there to hit it but this isn't going to be running Windows 98 we shouldn't find ourselves unable to kill locked processes and needing to hit that except in very rare circumstances around the back we get the feel for the modular nature of the machine there's a 623 watt power supply which pulls right out after releasing two thumb screws if that should fail we can be back up and running within 60 seconds of the part arriving and that's key to SGI's marketing message productivity is a major part of what justifies the price tag time is money and you'll get more done in less time with their hardware and that encompasses reduced hardware downtime the psu can be flanked by up to five boards and we have to present on the left is the mandatory system module and that includes from the bottom up two serial ports with the first one doubling as a console port to see what's going on if you don't have a monitor plugged in a ps2 keyboard and mouse port a parallel port a built-in Ethernet port external scuzzy port and a nice selection of audio ports above that with digital audio in and out the octane would actually make a nice digital audio workstation assuming that is you can sing louder than the sound of the fans we also have coaxial digital ports three and a half mil analog audio port power for a set of SGI speakers a regular stereo speaker or headphone out port and a microphone input audio is supplied by SGI zoner low latency rad audio chip which gives us eight 24 bit channels and rad is not an acronym but a contraction of the word radical because this remember is the 90s that's the system module on the left on the right we have slots for your choice of x io modules x io is a high performance bus which connects these modules directly to the memory controller and we'll go into buses or lack thereof momentarily but i standard you'd have your choice of video card fitted in this space our video card is a double width model so it takes up two slots and it has the 13 w 3 video out port common on workstations such as those by sun and next and below that is a 3d socket and this is for stereoscopic 3d glasses you might also find optional cards here such as the octane compression card for real-time M JPEG compression and the octane personal video card for use with the o2 cam for a spot of videoconferencing perhaps you want to get even more radical by adding additional rad cards for more audio inputs and outputs but I have an o2 cam but as an aside this is an SGI indie cam that was an option with the indie workstation which was released in 1993 another machine we should take a look at someday SGI then adopting cameras and videoconferencing once again to encourage and promote productivity with its machines in the middle of the machine above the PSU we have a blanking plate but optionally a PCI module could be purchased which slots in here that would allow you to install three PCI cards something regular PC owners would be much more familiar with more so than this fancy high-speed xio stuff finally the top of the case is dominated by the fan outlet and that's not a decorative plastic Louvre that's a solid hunk of metal and part of the reason this whole ensemble weighs in at 25 kilograms respect should definitely be paid them to the IT departments responsible for moving and installing these monsters it's certainly a stunning looking machine I think you'll agree and just the ports on the back tell us it has a lot of promise but I think we really need to pull the board's out from the inside take them over to the safety of the anti-static mat in the lab and see what this is made up of to fully understand it while I'm doing that I think it's important that we don't lose sight of what this machine was used for it's all very well me loading up a game of doom or quake but I just wouldn't do it justice for that reason we have Steven he's come to help us to tell us exactly what he used the octane for in the late 90s when he used the machine in anger and he's got some examples of the things he produced to show us so let's take a look at Stevens video and get to know the octane a little better so back in 1995 I was working at IBM to UK laboratories in Winchester particularly working in that development virtual reality and for 3d so I was doing a lot of VR environments and 3d studios so there's a lot of rendering involved and I'm to that point I've been using think pads and the AIX systems which were abundance within the labs I was known for a stone on I liked and actually stealing all of the machines circa set up a rendering farm so just to keep pump out all those frames I needed for the next day some of you and then I haven't in move offices one project time being a space under the desk was a SGI obtain instantly recognizable it's not the holy grail of 3d render it's really as host machines guess because later logo 3d cube and the blue-green color of the system and the designer it was just you know striking things to have around the only reason I could think it was there obviously being an idea and you wouldn't expect this kind of thing to be around was that William Latham who had the office before me was doing a lot of computations for his evolutionary art he went on at least go and do some videos for the Shaymin so people might know from him from that so obviously you know I grab the system and you it I was only a designer but so I had no real technical knowledge at that time but I never less you know I was going to use this as much as I can I was using you text Lightwave software which had been designed for Babylon 5 and that was available for the SGI too so it really made a big difference to have this sea of black and beige and this one in a striking computer in the middle of it one so you know it's quite pretty cool really so are you used as a master system I used to have to for instance of the Mary Rose editor animation which sure Prince Charles took out to the US and it was an is quite a simple animation and but it used to take me all day overnight to render the frames for that term before and whereas the SGI was doing it in them adjust them an hour so which is amazing really i'm the resolutions weren't as high as there were now but nevertheless for me it was like coal dust so you know i use that as my master for modeler my render at master whoever yesterday i was really good at sending out the frame work to the other machines to render and I didn't basically never really looked back after that I used it for tomorrow's relative to do better studios and even just simple modeling tasks for my virtuality systems of use so yeah it's the one and only time we ever user sto I obviously the price you know when I moved on from IBM that's no wise we have only afford one but lucky I was lucky enough to have that as one of my early systems to use in my career so I guess I was pretty fortunate in there I think it's time we went back to reality I think I'm losing my grip Shawna's this is reality isn't it well this is real that'll teach him to go time-traveling [Music] fascinating stuff and yet more examples of the magic these things can produce thanks to Stephens insights this then is the system module and we pulled out the chassis because I don't really fancy lifting this whole machine over to the lab the system module is mostly dominated by huge finned lamps of metals sinking away heat from the chips now a home PC owner of the day would open up their PC and expect to find a motherboard with the CPU some RAM and a variety of expansion slots for your video sound cards and any other add-ons that you may have we have those familiar components to the CPU or in this case CPUs are in this module covered by the large heatsink we've got 2 or 10,000 CPUs running at 195 megahertz each the RAM is over here and we've got no less than 8 memory modules onboard amounting to 640 megabytes these are 200 pin SDRAM modules and they're split into four pairs with one bank per pair they have such features as ECC for error correcting and a registered or buffered making them more stable and of course more expensive I think in the late 90s I had 32 megabytes of RAM in my home PC at this point so there's nearly 20 times as much here and of course we mentioned the rad audio chip which is tucked under the CPU module in fact if I just swap these system modules over he's an unpopulated system module so you can see that the rad chip sits here churning out 24-bit audio and the CPU module would slot in here next to it the whole system module tray plugs into a backplane in the chassis via these their compression connectors and they have 96 gold pants each they're extremely easy to ruin with the smallest amount of dust and there are strict instructions in the manual not to touch or wipe them under any circumstances if you'll be an extra careful you should keep a compression connector cap over them which I don't have so I'm keeping these boards out the chassis for as shorter time as possible in your regular home PC the CPU and RAM would communicate on a system bus and other buses such as the PCI bus in which for example your sound card would sit would branch off from this to provide a communications channel between the peripherals and the CPU all the devices on the PCI bus would share the bandwidth between them as technology progressed from the late 90s that became a bottleneck for our pcs leading to the development of additional buses like the AG people used for our video cards alongside the PCI bus meanwhile the big boys at SGI took another approach the octane is based on SGI x-torq architecture it doesn't use a system bus and it has a packet-switched high bandwidth bus for the X i/o slots in which our video card sits instead of a classic PC system bus you can imagine the octane to be more like a network switch in its operation every part of the system has his own dedicated channel or port to the main memory and CPU this is known as the crossbar switch seven ports exist on the switch to mainline subsystems into the CPU and RAM resources that they need and no subsystem will compete with any other subsystem for bandwidth on the other ports each has a dedicated path of its own on the crossbar switch if we scale this up to an even more powerful SGI machine like the SGI origin servers seen here that model has an eighth port on the crossbar switch to connect it with other crossbar switches an uplink if you like with support for up to 128 CPUs so we can think of our octane a little like a single node origin server without that uplink port the crossbar switch really is a standout feature in these machines it's managed by a custom assic or application-specific integrated circuit designed by SGI one of the most complex created at the time and each of those ports has a 2 megabyte cache buffer the ports can link to multiple subsystems at once and each has an 800 megabyte per second throughput in each direction the result is a system whereby if you can't afford for example to drop a single frame in video editing when compositing live video or maybe you're accessing a 67 gigabyte image file not uncommon if you worked somewhere like Lockheed then you can guarantee a responsive experience thanks to the crossbar switch two seconds by the way that's how quickly SGI were able to demonstrate a 67 gigabyte image file opening in the late 90s with their hardware although not with our particular octane the CPUs used in the octane are reduced instruction set computer or risk processors these particular ones developed by MIPS computer systems we've come across RISC processors on the channel before notably in the Acorn RISC PC although that was an extremely rare example owing to intel's dominance in that market [Music] the philosophy of a RISC CPU is simple and instructions should take at most a single data memory cycle to complete as opposed to multiple cycles like a Sisk or complex instruction set computer like those used in an x86 processor it's all about efficiency and I particularly like the explanation of Joe Birnbaum of Hewlett Packard back in 1986 I think the notion is that computers spend most of their time 80% of their time as a symbolic number doing a few simple things and don't do the complex things very often and so the notion is that if you optimize the machine to do the simplest things as well as possible and to do the complex things as infrequently as possible then you might come out with the machine which for certain types of jobs would be more effective than those which pay the penalty of complexity of course all of the things that it does each of the times at a dozen similar processors would also be found in NEC supercomputers of the time and if you ever owned the first PlayStation or Nintendo 64 then you had a MIPS processor now before we get any dust on that compression connector let's get the board back into the chassis and we'll have a look at the video board [Music] moving briefly to our video card a variety of video card options were available for the octane at launch and later models were released for the octane successor the octane to which was a very similar machine almost identical in fact and those later cards were compatible with our octane the result was a choice of around 12 cards by the end of its lifetime this card is an SSI video card later renamed to the SSE and you can see occupies two of the four available xir expansion bays labeled a through 2d on the scale of octane video cards ours is about mid-range performance wise the specs of our card include a 27 megabyte frame buffer and no hardware texture memory this isn't a big problem when it comes to rendering scenes for video playback but if we wanted to review textured models in real time or play quake for example yes I know this thing isn't made for playing games really real-time rendering of textured 3d graphics will take a severe performance hit without that texture Ram [Music] but we can add texture memory modules on the card itself the very top end card by the end of the Octane's lifetime was the v12 and that offered 128 megabyte frame buffer and 104 megabytes of texture cache the launch price of the v12 video card just twenty eight thousand four hundred and ninety five US dollars or about the price of ninety nvidia geforce four cards at the time will carefully return that module back to the chassis now it's also worth mentioning that the dual head option kit was also available with this you had two video cards and a pci card with additional keyboard and mouse ports this would allow two people to work from one octane completely independently with their share of resources guaranteed thanks to that crossbar switch the machine may be out of sight with just two keyboards and monitors and mice on the desk and the operators would have no idea that they were working from the same hardware and wouldn't be fighting for each other's resources or slow in each other's tasks down while enjoying a full HD 1920 by 1200 resolution displays and 72 hertz try that on your late 90's pentium ii pc onto storage then the octane contains two white scuzzy buses one for the internal and one for external devices it supports ultra scuzzy speeds so that has a theoretical rate of 40 megabytes a second and the hard drive is hidden away here the bays will have a single connector attachment or SCA so no special discs are required just the caddy and you could also fit for example an I Omega zip drive or an LTO tape drive to back up your work without a problem here did you hear that Pixar to back up your work if you want to add a cd-rom drive then you can use the rear external scuzzy connector for an external drivers there are no five and a quarter inch bays in the front to be honest you'd probably be accessing most files over the network anyway a hardware RAID controller could also be added if you wanted to increase speed redundancy or both with extra hard disks in the remaining slots pretty standard stuff and exactly as it should be no expensive proprietary discs needed should yours fail well that's our SGI octane primer it's a machine with a definite stage presence it's a machine with a sense of purpose and as a machine that was catered specifically for that purpose but was it fit for purpose that's a question that I'd like to answer and not just by taking five minutes of captured footage to the end of this video I'd like to make an entire episode dedicated to the operation of the machine we'll take a look at the I ryx operating system popular applications of the time delve into things like 3d rendering and see exactly how powerful and how quick this machine was for a late nineties machine yes you can have a little look do running a bit more and know it doesn't run Crysis before you ask I'm sure you still will in the comments if you like Stephen in the episode today used the octane in anger if you've got examples of the work you created on it or if you just like to share your memories and be part of that second episode please do leave a comment I'll be making it in a couple of weeks time from when this is released and the more review out there that I can include the more memories of this machine-like and include the better the picture we can build of it so I'd love to include you leave a comment if you'd like to be involved until then thank you as always for watching thank you for exploring another fascinating machine and see you next time take care [Music] if you enjoy my content and would like to toss a coin into the hat to support the cave then check out patreon.com/crashcourse support [Music] you

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 315,770

Keywords: computer hardware, computer history, computer history documentary, computers, gamers nexus, nintendo 64, nostalgia, octane, octane2, pixar, restoreation, retro, retro computer, retro man cave, sgi crossbar, sgi depot, sgi octane, sgi octane 2, silicon graphics, teardown, tech, upgrade

Id: VHsA8iq4N0s

Length: 26min 10sec (1570 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2019