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Not an advertisement, just an answer and a pointer to more information.

In article <...>, dhess@Xenon.Stanford.EDU (Drew William Hess) writes:
|> The San Jose Mercury News had a small article today re: SGI's announcement
|> of their new supercomputers.  They also mentioned that the Power Challenge
|> systems use the TFP, which is, I believe, based on an earlier MIPS design
|> (R4000, I suppose) but with a floating point unit on steroids.  Has SGI
|> made any formal announcement of the TFP?  

Yes. Today at 10:00am EST in Washington DC. It was broadcast live via
satellite to a number of locations, including our corporate campus.

|> I believe that SGI did most of the development on the TFP in-house before
|> acquiring MIPS, so is SGI/MIPS going to make it available to third parties
|> as they do with the Rx000 series?

You can ask your sales rep, or can call the TFP marketing group for more
information about the True Floating Point (TFP) performance, architecture, 
and availability. The toll-free SGI information number is (800)800-7441.

|> On a related note, I thought that the new supercomputers had been dubbed
|> "Onyx," but the article makes no mention of this name.  Is the family
|> of supercomputers called "Challenge" and "Power Challenge," and the first
|> member of the family called "Onyx," or what?  I'm unclear on exactly
|> what was announced yesterday after reading the SJMN article (wouldn't be 
|> the first time).

Monday's press releases covered the Indigo XZ, the Indigo2, and Onyx. The
Onyx systems support up to 24-R4400 CPU's and up to 3 RealityEngine2's. A
high-speed 1.2 GByte/sec interconnect bus, new power, and other system
features are also involved. Onyx features the RealityEngine2, an advance
over the existing RealityEngine, and a lower-cost VTX system as well.

Today the Challenge server was announced and shown. It shares the same
system structure as Onyx, but exchanges graphics with more CPU's. The
new TFP processor and memory system architecture were also discussed. The
Power Challenge systems house up to 18-TFP CPUs, each with 300 MFlops
performance, for 5.4 GFlops system peak capability. Deskside versions
of both Challenge and Power Challenge exist.

The TFP architecture is quite innovative. Your sales rep, or the people
at the number above, can provide more information.

-- 

Be seeing you,      mtj@sgi.com  415.390.1455  M/S 7L-590
Michael Jones       Silicon Graphics, Advanced Graphics Division
                    2011 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mtn. View, CA 94039-7311