Lovely system, the R8000 is indeed a rare bird.. given the hype not a particularly remarkable CPU by any measure versus its contemporaries at launch (Alpha A21064A, IBM POWER2 and HP PA-RISC all traded heavy blows in that era, SPARC seemed perpetually behind) but would be a nice one to score. It was an interesting time as Alpha was really pushing clock speed while POWER2, PA-RISC, and the R8000 showed impressive numbers at much lower clocks.
I interviewed at Intel with the old Alpha group after all the acquisitions back in the day - around 2000 - and I remember talking with the guys there in that they couldn't get their EDA tools ported to the Alpha architecture; so they were designing this amazing cpu, but had to do it on "gasping and wheezing" Sparc systems. Good times.
We had the same issues where I ended up working; it was a year or two before 32-bit intel systems started to show up and they absolutely screamed compared to Sparc, but couldn't handle really big jobs. When the amd64 stuff started to come around, that's when you could just see the writing on the wall - Intel / AMD were gonna absolutely kill Sun...
Once upon a time you would buy an entire system from the EDA vendor like Mentor Graphics, Zuken or whomever, early on those could be quite bespoke and then eventually they used COTS like the HP 9000/300 and Apollo DN10000. And then the generic RISC systems purchased direct from the OEM and eventually the amd64 dominance you describe.
I have some IBM POWER2SC (SuperChip) systems with intel asset tags that presumably were used for something special (very pricey machine), maybe MCAD :)
PA-RISC was really pushing the performance horizon in the late '90s (like 2-3 years ahead of intel) and had great EDA tools support which was an odd situation because the ISA was effectively frozen in 1997 (thanks Itanium) and just got process and implementation updates that scaled pretty well.
Nice, that was before my time - we were basically a Sun shop and actually did a lot of chips for them (and SGI) too. I never saw any of the HP, IBM, or other systems.
Actually no, just 32-bit intel with Linux - we were a Sun shop and Linux with EDA tools hadn't matured enough although Linux had been around for awhile.
But yeah, it was only a couple more years until amd64 came around and really made a difference.
Around 2000 was the time I first switched to Linux as my primary desktop OS -- I disliked Windows XP that badly, I put up with the slightly ropy experience of Caldera OpenLinux.
So it was very definitely A Thing by the turn of the century, but maybe not all the tools that everyone needed were available yet. (And the only usable desktop distros still cost money back then.)
And now flipping through the pictures of the internals - I ended up working for LSI Logic in the early 2000's, so it's fun to see all these LSI chips although they were before my time. Certainly some of my older colleagues worked on these.
You'll notice the numbers on these L1Axxxx - this is an internal LSI number, after they ran out of numbers for the xxxx part they bumped it to L2Axxxx and I worked on a few chips with those designations.
Yeah, LSI had their own standard cell libraries up to around 180nm, then they didn't want to invest in fabs and started working with TSMC - beginning of the end for them really. I signed off a couple chips on both sides of that transition.
I worked in a group that did physical design, timing closure, test insertion, etc. I did a lot of layout automation in Avanti's tools; sometime after I left, it all went to Cadence I believe.
