We had the same issues where I ended up working; it was a year or two before 32-bit intel systems started to show up and they absolutely screamed compared to Sparc, but couldn't handle really big jobs. When the amd64 stuff started to come around, that's when you could just see the writing on the wall - Intel / AMD were gonna absolutely kill Sun...
You'll notice the numbers on these L1Axxxx - this is an internal LSI number, after they ran out of numbers for the xxxx part they bumped it to L2Axxxx and I worked on a few chips with those designations.
I worked in a group that did physical design, timing closure, test insertion, etc. I did a lot of layout automation in Avanti's tools; sometime after I left, it all went to Cadence I believe.
I have some IBM POWER2SC (SuperChip) systems with intel asset tags that presumably were used for something special (very pricey machine), maybe MCAD :)
PA-RISC was really pushing the performance horizon in the late '90s (like 2-3 years ahead of intel) and had great EDA tools support which was an odd situation because the ISA was effectively frozen in 1997 (thanks Itanium) and just got process and implementation updates that scaled pretty well.
Steve Jobs wanted NeXT to essentially be SGI.
I have a soft spot for the Octane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Octane
The G4 cube, was Apple version of it whe when Jobs returned to Apple.
Though it's especially hilarious that MIPS ARC died pretty fast (outside of SGI ARC variant which was big-endian) so on most other platforms Windows was dragging around a wrapper around platform firmware that provided enough ARC interfaces for ntoskrnl.exe to boot.
And retrocomputing geeks (and just any geek sufficiently old) got rueful grins on their faces.
This is traditional, in the sense of being old-fashioned. CPUs were built out of discrete components back when that meant individual vacuum tubes, discrete solid-state components, and then, finally, discrete chips. Thousands of individual SSI chips in computers like the Apollo Guidance Computer. Even after the first single-chip CPU was developed, larger computers still used multi-chip CPUs, like the PDP-11 architecture being implemented on four chips in the LSI-11 chipset.
https://gunkies.org/wiki/LSI-11_chip_set
That's before some people were born, I guess, so we have this.
In the mainframes the TCM is somewhat famous, really beautiful Bipolar designs with relatively low gate count but a ton of high performing dice (and high heat, hence TCM) on an exotic MCM.
I used a purple Indigo 2 as my desktop for a few years.
When there were some issues with the local hot and cold running power for a few weeks, sometimes I'd get home to my study after being out and about and see 'brownout detected' on my console xterm.
That was my cue to add "coax the x86 kit in the rack back to life" to my task list once I'd had a coffee and settled in.
(later it got rehomed to DrHyde's place in London where it served honourably as a CPAN testers machine until finally passing away of old age)
And then you had to buy the software. A license for a 3D modeling package like Softimage or Alias cost at least $10-15k, and you probably also needed a separate raytracing package for high-quality output.
Someone is selling a copy of Alias for SGI for $2500 on eBay today: https://www.ebay.com/itm/335622694059
But if, in 1994, you did have an SGI and Alias and enough artistic skill and technical competence (and patience…) to produce liquid logos and dancing soda bottles and face morphs, you would certainly recoup that $80k investment quickly. It was a very rare skill that needed very rare hardware. You could get highly paid freelance work by simply calling up ad agencies.
That scarcity a bit hard to imagine today, when anyone can download Blender onto their standard desktop computer and learn it by watching online videos. It’s cool that 3D art has been thoroughly democratized.
They were so expensive they only made sense to run 24/7/365 in order to get their money’s worth. They had a service engineer on call permanently who wasn’t allowed to be further away than 25 miles from the servers at any time.
How does the documentation for the software development environment for this machine stack up today?
Yeah, I think the disks are the crux of the matter. Afaik, SCSI disks (those with a parallel interface) haven't been made in decades (those with FC interface are still made, I think). IDE drives, OTOH, can trivially be replaced (upgraded) with CF cards. Is there a SCSI to IDE (oh the horror) adapter?
And me disposing of an Sun Ultra 60 because it (was ancient and) came with the inferior IDE interface ...