POWER Challenge
The POWER Challenge was announced on 28 January 1993 and was intended to compete against supercomputer companies such as Cray Research. At the time of its announcement, Silicon Graphics claimed that the POWER Challenge would have the same level of performance as Cray's Cray Y-MP with a single microprocessor. The new model was introduced in the middle of 1994 and used the MIPS R8000 microprocessor chip set, which consisted of the R8000 microprocessor and R8010 floating point unit accompanied by a "streaming" cache and its associated controllers. Much of the POWER Challenge's performance depended on the R8000, a microprocessor intended to achieve supercomputing performance and designed for floating-point scientific applications. As a result, the R8000 had features such as fused multiply–add instructions and a large cache.
In 1995, Silicon Graphics upgraded the POWER Challenge with R8000 microprocessors clocked at 90 MHz, enabling the system to scale up to 6.48 GFLOPS, an improvement of 1 GFLOPS over the previous R8000 microprocessor clocked at 75 MHz.
| Model | # of CPUs | CPU | CPU MHz | L2 cache | Memory | Chassis | Introduced | Discontinued |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| L (Large) |
1 to 6 | R8000 | 75 or 90 | 4 MB | 6 GB | Deskside | ? | 21 January 1997 |
| GR (Graphics Ready) |
1 to 12 | R8000 | 75 or 90 | 4 MB | ? | ? | ? | 21 January 1997 |
| XL (Extra Large) |
2 or 18 | R8000 | 75 or 90 | 4 MB | 64 MB to 16 GB | Rackmount | ? | 21 January 1997 |
Read more about this topic: SGI Challenge, Models
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