try deskstation Raptor Reflex
or read this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShaBLAMM!_NiTro-VLB

Siemens-Nixdorf RM-200, RM-300 and RM-400
DeskStation Tyne
NeTpower FASTseries Falcon

I dont think you will find a board for sale just complete systems

Interesting - that ShaBLAMM! is a computer on a VLB card, which is used to upgrade i486 systems. I wonder what that would look like in a system.

ShaBLAMM Nitro MIPS cards aren't common hardware. I only saw one once at eBay like 3 years ago (still the site had the older web interface, before became the crap is today). Like with Alpha CPUs, your chances are higher for complete systems than just boards. So many years trying to find one of those AlphaPC ATX-compatible boards made by Compaq, and never could find anything.

feipoa wrote:

Anyone have a working system based on the IDT Orion MIPS CPU, e.g. R4600, R4700, or R5000, designed by Quantum Effect Design? ht […]
Show full quote

Anyone have a working system based on the IDT Orion MIPS CPU, e.g. R4600, R4700, or R5000, designed by Quantum Effect Design?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R4600
http://chipdb.org/img-idt-79rv4700-133g-785.htm

Wiki mentions it was for low-end workstations and ran on NT. It also has an FPU, which supposedly isn't that great. I was thinking it would be neat to benchmark these chips, even if it can only use operating systems like NT.

Does anyone know what motherboard models this might run off of so I can hunt them down on eBay?

some sgi indy's ran 4600's you can find 100mhz + 133mhz with no cache (4600PC) and 133mhz with 512kb cache (4600sc). Some old cisco routers also ran 4600+4700 cpu.

you can look for IP20, IP22 and IP24 boards. Indy, Indigo and Indigo 2, Challenge M, Challenge S. These will all be a mix of r4200/4400/4600/4700/5000. Some IP32 O2' had r5000 but most were r10k, r12k.

thing to note, the r4600 stuff running NT4, your not gonna find clone mobo, from memory its basically just the SGI stuff, and as for running benchmarks, there was little to no apps available for NT4 MIPS. Youd have to compile your own benchmark code. All these ip20/22/24 architecture is pure custom sgi chips, etc. best to get entire SGI Indy. MIPS NT4 is not fun 🤣!

Well, I think I have Roy Longbottom's source code as well as BYTE's Bytemark's. Might still be interesting to benchmark as I don't think anyone has benchmarked these CPUs. I would have to get the system for nearly free though to bother.

Do you know what software was available pre-compiled for these systems?

I dont really see the point, the 133Mhz 4600 with 512kb cache is slower than a Pentium MMX 166.

http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/benchmarks/
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/blender.html
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/quake1bench.html
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/gfxtables.html
http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/linpackjava/r … mings/assim/sgi

a 4600 with cache gets 14 FPS in quake at 320x240 and 5 FPS at 640x480

The MIPS cpus were never that impressive. Always hobbled by cache coherancy issues.

As for precompiled mips nt4 software, I dont recall much of any. The system was DOA. nobody used it. I believe the mips port had less traction than the alpha + powerpc ports of nt4. mips support was killed with NT4 ServicePack 1 it was dead that fast.

If you want to compile benchmark sources, thats your second proble, you need to get a mips nt4 compiler 😀 aaaand I only know of one, MIPS nt4 visual c++ 2.0, I dont know how hard it would be to find MSVC20

Maybe someone made a gcc for it.

why were they used so often for graphics workstations and high performance routers?

mrau wrote:

why were they used so often for graphics workstations and high performance routers?

They were used for graphics workstations because of their FPU performance. I don't know much about network equipment to comment on routers.

BloodyCactus wrote:

If you want to compile benchmark sources, thats your second proble, you need to get a mips nt4 compiler 😀 aaaand I only know of one, MIPS nt4 visual c++ 2.0, I dont know how hard it would be to find MSVC20

Visual C++ 4.0 will work also. There is an archived copy of it on BetaArchive, I even have my own boxed copy (for my Alpha).

you right! I forgot vc42 supported mips. probably easier to find than vc20 as well..

Thanks for the links!

In Quake at 640x480 (software mode), I see that a R4600SC/133 gets a whopping 5.5 fps. By way of comparison, an Am5x86-160 gets 5.5 fps.

On a much faster R4400SC 250 MHz 2 MB, it scores 8.8 fps. By way of comparison, a Pentium 60 scores 8.6 fps. Not all that impressive.

In Quake II at 640x480 (software mode), I see that a R4400SC 250 MHz scores 6.8 fps. By way of comparison a Pentium 100 scores 6.6 fps.

I think these results have sufficiently satisfied my curiosity. You really need to get into the R10000-R16000 series at 400-900 MHz to arrive at PIII-600 levels.

I've done a few youtube videos about the Indy & O2 that may interest some:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYi0HR … pLUHR7gNHWX_rdW

I go over some of the hardware options in one of the videos.

IRIX is a pretty cool OS.

feipoa wrote:

Thanks for the links! […]
Show full quote

Thanks for the links!

In Quake at 640x480 (software mode), I see that a R4600SC/133 gets a whopping 5.5 fps. By way of comparison, an Am5x86-160 gets 5.5 fps.

On a much faster R4400SC 250 MHz 2 MB, it scores 8.8 fps. By way of comparison, a Pentium 60 scores 8.6 fps. Not all that impressive.

In Quake II at 640x480 (software mode), I see that a R4400SC 250 MHz scores 6.8 fps. By way of comparison a Pentium 100 scores 6.6 fps.

I think these results have sufficiently satisfied my curiosity. You really need to get into the R10000-R16000 series at 400-900 MHz to arrive at PIII-600 levels.

yes, SGI mips got knocked to the wayside really fast. Even the r10k, r12k, r16k are not very interesting. still plagued by cache coherancy and chipset issues, but then, nobody could keep up with intel. digital needed refrigerator sized heatsinks on the alpha to compete.

but as far as unix workstation hardware went, the sgi stuff was pretty cool and they always had awesome case design! custom graphics SUPER lagged behind amd/nvidia.

Just read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R4600 (and some other articles).
Some quotes:
"The R4600 was designed as a low-end workstation or high-end embedded microprocessor."
"The R4600 was a simple design; it was a scalar processor, issuing up to one instruction per cycle to its integer pipeline or floating-point unit (FPU). ... The FPU was not pipelined to save die area and thus cost. This characteristic severely restricted the R4600's floating-point performance, ..."
Indeed it only has 2.2M transistors, P1 has 3.1M, P1 MMX 4.5. It has 16kB + 16kB L1 cache just like P1 MMX.
Its not a surprise that it is not fast comparing to Pentiums. Besides Quake (or Quake II) is probable an invalid comparison, the Intel version is massively optimized for Pentium using assembly code, and I don't think that versions for other platforms are very well optimzed.

idspispopd wrote:

Indeed it only has 2.2M transistors, P1 has 3.1M, P1 MMX 4.5. It has 16kB + 16kB L1 cache just like P1 MMX. Its not a surprise that it is not fast comparing to Pentiums.

you cant compare a mips isa vs x86 isa based on the number of transistors.