Information on Power Series and Personal Irises

[Ian S. Small]

We are considering purchasing some Irises in the somewhat
distant future, so are in the middle of trying to gather information
about the new machines.  We have a number of questions which are more
likely to be answered by fellow netlanders than by SGI salesmen.
Please send all replies by e-mail; we will summarise and post
if there is sufficient interest.

I don't know if there are actually any real Power Iris sites out there yet;
beta sites might be able to help with some of these questions.
Personal Iris questions should be easier.

The questions are:

1) What make of SMD disk controller and SMD disks does SGI supply with the
   Power Iris?  We are naturally interested in going the third party route
   for these components.  Our preferred controllers and disks are the Ciprico
   32xx and Fujitsu M23xx lines.

2) What do the memory board modules look like on the Power Iris?  Is there
   a chance of purchasing the memory add-ons from a third party vendor
   such as Clearpoint, Helios, Parity, etc.?  This is possible with Suns
   and Mac II's and so on because of the generic SIMMs being used - is
   it the case with the new Iris?

3) The same memory board module question applies for Personal Irises - what
   does the 8 MB memory increment look like?

4) Has anybody tried running an SMD disk controller out of the single VME
   'slot' on a Personal Iris?  Is it possible?  How fast is it?

5) Is there any way to get access to the SCSI bus in a Personal Iris?
   There didn't seem to be an *external* connector, which begs the
   question of whether there's an *internal* one hiding in there somewhere.

6) Does anybody have any experience with plugging arbitrary VME boards into
   the 4D line?  If it works on a MIPS, is it likely to work on a 4D?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.
-- 

Ian S. Small                      Dynamic Graphics Project
				  Computer Systems Research Institute
				  University of Toronto
(416) 978-6619			  Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A4