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XFS, OpenGL, Inventor etc. already is free
by Anonymous on Thu 17th Feb 2005 19:19 UTC

IRIX, as an OS is pretty tied to the MIPS architecture, and to make it scale properly on AMD64/PPC would be so much work that it's easier just to use Linux, which is exactly what they have done with their Itanium-based designs.

And i'm curious as to why anybody thinks anybody runs IRIX out of choice - The only reason anybody runs IRIX is because its the only OS that supports their hardware fully.

IRIX and SGI's proprietary APIs and hardware used to reperesent the bleeding edge of multimedia development in the computer industry, and to some extent they still do - the SGI Octane2/Fuel/Tezros are the only workstations capable of moving uncompressed HDTV around in realtime, but largely, those days are gone.

IRIX's Motif-based desktop and apps are antiquated, and you can get better OpenGL performance on smallish datasets from a $500 x86 machine with an NVidia FX-5200 than a $50,000 RealityEngine-based system.

I keep an O2 around for nostalgia reasons, and because it actually still makes a pretty good analog video I/O system, but if Linux supported the hardware, I would dump IRIX in a second.

I mean, can anybody explain what advantage an IRIX port to PPC or AMD64 would have over Linux at this point? And since you'd have to actually pay money for IRIX.. Nope, I think its a dead horse.