User:Schol-r-lea/Early MIPS Workstations

N.B.: This is one of a group of forum posts extracted so that the information in them can be re-worked into a less confrontational, more informational set of wiki pages. They are here only temporarily.

First off, you do realize that that is a CPU, not a full computer or even a motherboard, correct? Most of the systems that used the TMPR3927 (or any other MIPS implementation of the time) didn't actually use PCI, because they didn't have any extension buses - they were game consoles with fixed hardware and proprietary connectors for a limited selection of proprietary user controller devices. I don't know if the Sony consoles used the PCI bus model internally, but even if they did, that was only because that was what that particular implementation was designed for. That was Toshiba's decision, and had nothing to do with the MIPS in general.

Second, PCI was used on a lot of systems at the time, and while it arose out of the PC world, it wasn't tied to the PC specifically. PowerPC Macs used it. Pegasus II PPC motherboards used it. DEC Alpha workstations used it. Even some zSystem minis used it. It was a common interface which had been specifically designed not to be dependent on the x86. The cards that worked on it? Different story, since most were designed to only work on PCs.

That having been said, there weren't a lot of MIPS desktops and workstations which used PCI, because there were never a lot of MIPS desktops and workstations. I don't know of a single MIPS desktop-class system at all prior to the Loongson, more's the pity. The Advanced Computing Environment project, which was intended to come up with a replacement for the PC (which was already long in the tooth by 1991), was supposed to use MIPS, but the whole thing ended in acrimony and not a single system implementing the idea was ever sold, though a bunch of systems around that time which no one ever heard of took some of the ideas and made a hash of them to everyone's detriment.

The only MIPS workstations of any real note were the Silicon Graphics Indigo, Iris, Octane, and Indy systems, of which only the Octane (and the Origin rack-mounted server) used PCI to the best of my knowledge; the earlier ones had proprietary buses which they never licensed (meaning that for the most part, only SGI hardware worked in SGI machines). Oh, and there were later models of the Sony NEWS worsktations which used MIPS, too, and those didn't use PCI either; they died out before PCI had really come into the market in significant amounts at all, really. Sony would prefer people forgot their disastrous foray into that market, anyway, and frankly, no one misses them.