On Sat, Nov 24, 2001 at 12:08:29PM -0600, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > Why is SGI seemingly planning on migrating to the Intel IA64 architecture? I don't know how much I can actually talk about this stuff, but I say a few things about our architecture. SGI Origin/Onyx 3000 machines are built from "bricks." There are several types of bricks that make up a system. I I/O Brick, includes two drives, CD and XIO. Required to boot a system. C CPU brick, includes 4 MIPS CPUs, memory, NumaLink and XIO P PCI brick, include (I think) 6 PCI buses with 2 slots each D Disk brick, 12 drive JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) R Router, connects four C-bricks together X Metarouter, connects R bricks together. G Graphics brick, makes the system an Onyx The beauty of the architecture is that you can make whatever type of system you want. What we're doing with Intel is making another type of C-brick. If we had the time, money, and the market, we could make a C-brick that uses any CPU. Athlon? Alpha? Whatever. Nate