On Sun Dec 28 2003 at 18:27:04 +0900, Toru Nishimura wrote:
> Although it does not technically belong here, I would like to collect
> the details about SGI's Pentium boxes in favour of the company.
> 
> - It's reported the little endian version of ARCS machine tailoured
> for Pentium processor.  Is it true?

If you're talking about the Visual Workstation (320 and 540, if I
remember the model numbers right), they have ARCS-ish PROM that can load
some executable format binaries from FAT partitions for booting (I think
it was ECOFF but that was a long long time ago so I could be wrong).

> - How about its graphics engines?  Can any technological DNA be
> traced back to famous SGI design?

The graphics engine is quite close to the O2 graphics AFAIK (close
enough that the Linux framebuffer drivers for the two have references to
borrowing code from each other or so).

> - Do anyone out there hope to use NetBSD for the abandoned
> products?

The Visual Workstations are pretty useless machines in a sense, as
they're pretty much just glorified PCs with custom PROM and graphics
hardware (well, the chipset is somewhat custom too). If you want a
fast-ish PC you can get much faster and already supported hardware
pretty cheap... Although the VisWS physical design is pretty nice (which
also means "all upgrades are ultra expensive as they're SGI custom
stuff").

-- 
Ilpo Ruotsalainen - <lonewolf@iki.fi> - http://www.iki.fi/lonewolf/