Welcome to the Silicon Graphics Web Navigation Console. Below you can configure the browsing arsenal that powered the artists, physicists, and dreamers of the ’90s—and pit those teal towers against today’s tensor-farm fantasies. Select a workstation, align an IRIX release, and see how the price/performance story evolved from SGI glam to H100 grind. Warning: by the time you scroll to the price banner you will want an SGI, an H100 rack, or both.
CPUs: MIPS R3000/R4000 | RAM: 24–128 MB
Browsers: NCSA Mosaic (Motif), early Arena builds
Static HTML 1.0, inline GIFs, no frames. Perfect for rendering teapots while you read a CERN press release.
R4400 at a blistering 250 MHz. Netscape Navigator 2.x arrives: tables, frames, JavaScript 1.0, and the ability to crash spectacularly on malformed `
Unified Memory Architecture meets Netscape 3.01 Gold. JavaScript 1.1, animated GIFs, and livestreaming QuickTime if you sacrificed enough RAM. Great for coding VRML scenes at 3 a.m.
Dual-channel graphics, IMPACT rails, Netscape 4.05–4.78. CSS 1, DOM Level 0, and the occasional browser freeze whenever DHTML gets ambitious. Still, you can monitor your render farm and browse Slashdot simultaneously.
Community ports of Mozilla 1.0/1.2 via Nekoware. CSS 2 partial support, better PNG handling, but startup times counted in coffee breaks. Comparable to what a G3 Mac could pull off with Mozilla 1.0.
R16k or Itanium horsepower. Firefox 1.5 ports exist, but most SGI veterans switch to x86/Linux for modern browsing and keep the SGI purely for Maya, Flame, or massive OpenGL sims.
NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 3090. Chrome, Firefox Quantum, and the rise of CUDA. Hobbyists build “AI rigs” that could vaporize an Indigo PSU.
H100, DGX Spark, eight-way HGX trays. PyTorch/LLAMA/Claude on demand. You can serve GPT-4 sized models from your garage if your power company approves.
No Internet Explorer. Microsoft never ported IE to IRIX. Netscape dominated, with late-era relief from community Mozilla/Firefox builds. Expect IE5-grade content to render better on your G3 Mac than on an SGI; the Octane2 with Mozilla 1.0 will match a Mac running the same vintage build, but nothing beyond that.
JavaScript Reality. Netscape 4′s JS 1.2 is roughly IE4-level. Dynamic HTML will break. The Retro AI Proxy solves this by rendering psuedo-live UIs that target IE5 features but degrade to iframe polling—exactly the kind of trick an SGI could use to stay useful in 2025.
Use Cases. Monitor SGI news feeds, order visual effects middleware, render check your latest Maya scene, and yes—run your Retro AI Proxy in a teal window, because you can.
Wonder what that teal tower would cost in today’s AI arms race? Adjust the dials below and compare the sticker shock.
$12,995 (1991) / ≈ $26,000 today
R4000 100 MHz, 64 MB RAM, GR2-XZ graphics
AI perf: ≈ 0.00005 tokens/sec — suitable for ASCII palm trees
$74,995 (1999) / ≈ $130,000 today
R12000 400 MHz, MXE graphics, 2 GB RAM
AI perf: ≈ 0.0003 GPT-4 tokens/sec (mostly renders teapots)
$110,995 (2004) / ≈ $170,000 today
4× R16000 700 MHz, V12 graphics, IRIX 6.5.22
AI perf: ≈ 0.0007 tokens/sec if you bribe IRIX with coffee
≈ $30,000 (2025 street)
80 GB HBM3, 3.5 PFLOPS FP8
AI perf: ≈ 2.5M GPT-style tokens/min
≈ $250,000 barebones
8× H100 NVLink, 28 PFLOPS FP8
AI perf: ≈ 20M tokens/min (and 20k BTU/hr)
$3,999 (desktop kit, 2025)
1× Spark AI SoC, 32 GB HBM3e, 400 W PSU
AI perf: ≈ 400k tokens/min — think “personal GPT lab”
≈ $3,800 (MSRP×2)
48 GB combined GDDR7, 1 kW draw
AI perf: ≈ 1.2M tokens/min with mixed precision
≈ $3,000 (MSRP×2)
48 GB combined GDDR6X, 900 W
AI perf: ≈ 750k tokens/min, still cheaper than therapy