SGI Visual Workstation 320
SGI's...frankly bizarre attempt to break into the x86 workstation world. The Visual Workstation series are seemingly more fondly remembered for their weird quirks and sheer limitations than any usefulness they brought to the market.
The SGI Visual Workstation (both 320 and 540) models are NOT PC's. They run x86 processors but everything surrounding them is completely custom
- Instead of a BIOS they use the "ARC" Firmware loader
- Most of the system is chained behind the "Cobalt", "Lithium" and "Arsenic" chips. These are custom ASIC chips that control most of the system functionality including graphics, sound, access to the "UMA" high-bandwidth memory, the video ports and the (non-functional on 320 series) firewire ports. All x86 peripherals (IDE, RTC and others) are "slaved" behind this chip
- The PCI slots are non-standard voltage at 3.3 volts rather than 5 volts. Making it virtually impossible to add expansion cards to the device
Additionally due to the custom firmware (ARC) and weird ASIC chips, the only two supported OS's are Windows NT4 and Windows 2000. XP won't even boot on this machine.
Linux support was removed many years ago, though due to lack of interest from SGI was never really supported anyway (no accelerated X server among other missing hardware functionality)
At this time this unit is not in use
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