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Title: SGI's Indy matures: the 100MHz Mips R4600PC CPU provides a good performance base for the Indy's impressive graphics

Author(s): Ralph Barker

Source: UNIX Review. 13.8 (July 1995): p61.

Document Type: Cover story, Product/service evaluation, Product/service evaluation

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In the March 1994 issue, we reviewed Silicon Graphics Inc.'s (SGI's) Indy workstation running the 100MHz R4000PC CPU. While the current Indy's pizza-box cabinet still looks the same, the soul of the machine has matured. The current entry-level system now uses the Mips R4600PC chip, also running at 100MHz. This hardware advance and the range of new software options now available for the Indy warrant another look.

SGI's reputation as the system vendor of choice for people who develop or work with graphics-intensive multimedia applications was not lightly earned. The current model of the Indy continues to provide a working environment impressively enhanced by SGI's twist on graphics and sound. While this review focuses on the hardware and the basic operating-system features, the graphics and video collaboration software side of the Indy may actually be the more improtant story. Some of this software is bundled with the operating system in both the current version of the system and the earlier model we reviewed. Early version rough spots, such as noticeable delays in screen response that were noted in that review, have been smoothed in the current model.

The system we tested falls at the low end of the Indy line. This system included the Mips R4600PC CPU running at 100MHz. This chip includes 16KB of cache for data and another 16KB of cache for instructions. The Indy is also available with the R4600SC (secondary cache) processor running at 133MHz, as well as a later model of the R4600PC chip also running at the faster 133MHz clock rate. The R4600SC chip also has 16KB of cache for data and another 16KB of cache for instructions, plus an extra 512KB of secondary cache. At the upper end of the Indy scale is the model using the R4400SC CPU running at 175MHz. The R4400SC chip includes the 16KB/16KB data and instruction cache configuration plus a full megabyte of secondary cache. Rather than being part of the main system board, the CPU resides on a daughterboard, making it easily upgradable.

Following industry norms, SGI's C language compiler is unbundled from the operating system. The C compiler and full development libraries can be ordered separately as the Indy Developer's Option (IDO). CASE tools and the C++ compiler must also be obtained separately. Pricing information from SGI reflects a strong preference for system and software bundles; the bundled price is substantially less than the combined separate prices. Later hardware upgrades also appear to be more expensive than initial system price differences. For example, the price difference between an 8-bit color system and a comparable 24-bit color system is $3,500, while the 24-bit color upgrade is priced at $5,000 when ordered separately.

Installation

The Indy's IRIX 5.3 operating system is pre-installed, so setting up the system is limited to connecting a few cables. While the aesthetics of the back of the system cabinet are austere, few systems offer as many connection options in such little real estate. The connectors on the back of the system are identified with icons, rather than text. The meaning of each connector icon is obvious, at least for the standard system cables, resulting in a quick and painless installation.

Although the commonly used elements of the operating system are pre-installed, a CD-ROM of the full operating system is included with the basic documentation set. According to sources at SGI, the operating system is divided into approximately 200 subsets, of which about 120 are pre-installed. The CD-ROM also includes about 50 demo applications, of which only 3 are pre-installed in the standard operating-system load. A trial version InPerson, SGI's videoconferencing software, is also included in the basic package on CD-ROM.

Documentation

SGI follows the industry trend of providing only minimal hard-copy documentation for the Indy. An Indy Workstation Owner's Guide comes in printed form and provides system-installation, basic setup, and hardware-related information. A small wire-bound quick-reference booklet, the Indigo Magic Desktop: Understanding the Basics, is also included. This booklet includes pictures of various introductory-level screens and provides rudimentary instructions to get started in the Indy's graphical environment.

The intended primary source of information for the user is the extensive online documentation. The Indy's online documentation includes an audio-visual system tour as well as desktop help, online books (the IRIS InSight Library, organized into bookshelves for users, administrators, and developers), man pages (viewed through the conventional xman interface), and release notes for all the installed products (including bug fixes and known problems along with any known workarounds). While we continue to be avid proponents of printed system-administration documentation, the scope, depth of coverage, and ease of use of the Indy's online documentation provides a strong argument for the save-a-tree approach. Considering the extent of SGI's online documentation, we were surprised that the owner's manual was not reproduced online as well.

Expandability

Bus Slots

The Indy has two GIO (Graphical I/O bus) expansion slots for professional video options, additional network interfaces, and other third-party option cards. Some GIO expansion cards, such as Ethernet, Fast SCSI-2, X.25, token ring, and Cosmo Compress (full-motion JPEG), are single-wide and require only one slot. Other cards, such as the FDDI network interface and the XZ graphics expansion, are double-wide and occupy both available slots. The Indy Video option card adds high-quality video output, allowing video sequences or presentations developed on the Indy to be output to tape.

Disk And Peripheral Support

The standard internal hard drives supported by the Indy are 3-inch-by-1-inch form factor and include 535MB, 1GB, and 2GB models. A 3-inch, 21MB floptical drive that also reads and writes standard PC and Macintosh diskettes is available as an option. External SCSI devices can be attached to either the external SCSI port or an auxiliary SCSI card.

Connectivity

Back-panel connectors on this model of the Indy include both AUI and RJ-45 Ethernet connections; external SCSI; parallel port; two serial ports using 8-pin minidin connectors and adapters; S-Video and standard video using a conventional RCA jack; microphone, headphone, and speaker jacks in addition to the connectors for the monitor, keyboard, and mouse. An ISDN port is standard on the Indy.

Operation And Ease Of Use

The hardware design of the Indy reflects good attention to detail and human-factors issues. The front panel of the system unit, for example, includes the power switch and a pair of up/down volume-control buttons. Pressing the power switch initiates a system shoudown rather than simply shutting off the power. This action is just what we think a power switch on an end-user system should do. The physical volume controls on the Indy are much faster for controlling the unexpected sound of a multimedia file than starting the audio control panel and making the volume adjustment via software. Cubicle dwellers, in particular, will appreciate the availability of the volume buttons.

Most general-usage aspects of the system are performed through the interface provided by SGI's Indigo Magic user environment. The foundation of the Indigo Magic user interface is the ubiquitous desktop paradigm. As with the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), an Indy user can configure multiple desktops with different application windows open in each and switch quickly between the desktops with the click of a mouse. The system remembers the configuration of each desktop at logout and re-creates the same environment the next time the user logs in. We were not able to find a reference to the maximum number of desktops a user can create, but we created a conventional user environment containing more than a dozen desktops without any complaint from the system.

At its most basic level, the interface provided by Indigo Magic is similar to other windowing environments in the UNIX realm. This commonality with other UNIX environments allows new Indy users to be productive soon. However, Indigo Magic includes many other features intended to increase ease of use. Folders, for example, can be created as part of the desktop. Opening a folder displays a new window with icons for each item (files or programs) in the folder. Unlike conventional file managers, opening a folder in Indigo Magic spawns a new window and displays the folder contents further. While some users might argue that this repeated window-spawning clutters the desktop, others will enjoy the ability to launch two or more programs without clicking back up the directory tree within a single-window file manager.

Another aspect of the Indigo Magic environment we found both useful and entertaining is the animated icons. When you double-click on an icon, you get both audio and visual feedback. For example, when you double-click on a folder icon, the system issues a sound and the folder icon opens. Similarly, when you double-click on a volume from one of the online-help bookshelves, the book slides out and opens. We found this user feedback useful, having quadruple-clicked on other systems' icons more than once, thereby launching multiple instances of the desired application.

Two optional software environments on the Indy are also note-worthy. These include SGI's WebForce authoring and server products and the suite of applications that compose the SGI collaborative environment. The collaborative tools include InPerson v. 2.0, SGI's desktop videoconferencing technology, and the IRIS Annotator. Annotator lets users attach digital media annotations (video, audio, images, text, and so forth) to 3-D models and then forward the annotated message to other collaborators via MediaMail or other means. Although developed for the Indy and Indigo lines, InPerson is also being ported to other UNIX platforms and MS Windows PCs, according to recent SGI and third-party announcements. Initial UNIX ports to Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard workstations are being done by Internezzo Technologies Inc. (Greenbrae, CA), while the PC port is being done by NetManage Inc. (Cupertino, CA). These applications are far beyond the scope of this review, but they warrant your separate examination.

The core of the system is, of course, the IRIX 5.3 operating system. This is a UNIX System V Release 4 operating system with 4.3 BSD extensions, and it conforms to IEEE POSIX 1003.1, FIPS 151-1, and SVID Issue 3 standards. IRIX 5.3 also includes X11R5, OSF/Motif Toolkit 1.2, Display PostScript, IRIS GL, and OpenGL. The Indigo Magic environment provides the SGI Media User Interface, IRIS Showcase 3.2, Media Tools, MediaMail, and Photo-CD support. The overall SGI software-development system supports C, C++, and FORTRAN 77 programming languages. SGI's Developer Magic environment also encompasses the CaseVision and CaseVision/Workshop tools for general program development and graphical debugging, the Impressario tools for scanning and printing application development, and RapidApp for application interface development. Documentation for all these tools is available in the online hypertext-based manuals.

Performance

The Indy model we tested was at the low end of the SGI line, and we anticipated its performance might be somewhat entry-level in nature. However, we were impressed by its reasonably perky performance. As with our other workstation reviews, we ran a combination of benchmarks, including the traditional Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks and the more intensive SPECint92 and SPECfp92 suites.

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The Indy raced through the Dhrystone 1.1 and 2.0 benchmarks, scoring 142.8KDhrystones and 136.2KDhrystones per second, respectively, on those tests. The Whetstone benchmarks had the Indy breathing a bit harder, where it came in at 43.3KWhetstones in the single-precision tests and 33.9KWhetstones in the double-precision tests. The Dhrystone benchmarks test the integer performance of the CPU while the Whetstone benchmarks measure floating-point speed. This fairly broad difference between integer and floating-point performance is also reflected in the SPEC benchmarks.

Our run of the SPECint92 (actually the less optimized SPECbase_int92) benchmarks scored an average rating of 55.3, compared to 34 on the original R4000PC-based Indy--a gain of about 63% in integer performance for this R4600PC chip. The current result is about 20% lower than SGI's published result of 67.0 for this particular CPU. Differences of around 10% in SPEC results are often seen with only minor differences in the compiler settings. This larger difference, we believe, was due largely to two factors. First, we prefer to run the benchmarks from within the graphical environment (thereby including the impact of the GUI's system overhead). This approach contrasts the conventional method of running benchmarks from a non-graphical system-console screen. Additionally, some nonshared libraries were absent from the particular machine we tested--a fact that affected our compiles of the SPEC tests. Our results on the SPECbase_fp92 (again, the almost unoptimized version of the SPECfp92 tests) came in at 43.73--very close to SGI's published results of 45.9. The 43.73 rating compares to 35 in the prior review of the R4000PC-based Indy--a gain of 25% in floating-point performance for this version of the R4600PC chip.

How It Rates

When assessing the quality of a system, we first examine five primary areas: installation, documentation, expandability, operation and ease of use, and performance. To arrive at our overall rating, we average scores for those areas and then combine them with considerations for pricing and various intangible aspects of a system's performance and design. When directly competing systems offer similar features and functionality, we also look at a system in relation to its peers within the marketplace.

As mentioned earlier, installing the Indy was a snap, even without the hard-copy owner's manual. The device icons on the back of the chassis were easy to follow, and the pre-installed operating system let us put the system to work quickly. However, more sophisticated configurations might warrant additional consideration to diskpartition layout and similar system-administration matters.

We found the Indy's online documentation excellent. While most systems now provide some degree of hypertext-based user documentation, we found the comprehensive scope of the Indy's documentation helpful. We were particularly impressed by the online release notes, as mentioned earlier, which provide information about known bugs and workarounds.

Expandability is difficult for so-called pizza-box systems such as the Indy. A lack of real estate on the back of the system limits most systems in this category to being average when compared to other types of systems. However, the wealth of multimedia-related connectors provided by the Indy, along with the conventional SCSI expansion capability, allows better-than-average expansion options to the user. This pushes the Indy into the next higher level, good in our ratings.

The Indy would be expected to rate well in operation and ease of use because of its well-recognized graphical user interface. In addition to the expected end-user features, however, we were impressed by the well-designed and easy-to-use system-management functions. Graphical tools for system, disk, user, NFS, printer, software, and ISDN management exist directly off the main desk menu icon. Additionally, various administration tools can be added as icons to the System Manager window, providing quick and easy setup of the network, serial port, and PPP configurations. The combination of these various ease-of-use functions warrants an excellent rating in this category.

As noted earlier, the performance of the Indy was better than we expected for this particular model. Other workstations within the same price range certainly are on par with the Indy or even faster in raw computational power--particularly in the area of floating-point performance. From a competitive comparison standpoint, the Indy's performance might rate as average. No other workstations in this price category take the same approach to graphics and sound, however. We feel that the combination of graphics performance and raw computing power reflected in the benchmark results nudge this model of the Indy into the good range.

Overall, we feel the Indy has matured well in the 16 months since our original review. The low-end system we tested would likely be adequate for a variety of development purposes--even applications that would take advantage of SGI's special twist on graphics and sound. The collaboration tools combined with the video capabilities of the Indy likely would make it an excellent choice for a broad range of engineering or business users as well. When averaged with the good and excellent scores in the other areas we focus on, these factors make the Indy rate an excellent overall.

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