SGI Octane

The Octane and the similar Octane2 are IRIX workstations marketed by SGI. Both are two-way multiprocessing-capable workstations, originally based on the MIPS Technologies R10000 microprocessor. Newer Octanes are based on the R12000 and R14000. The Octane2 has four improvements compared to Octane, a revised power supply, system board and Xbow. The Octane2 also shipped with VPro graphics and supports all the VPro cards. Later revisions of the Octane also included some of the improvements introduced in the Octane2. The codenames for the Octane and Octane2 are "Racer" and "Speedracer" respectively.

The Octane was the direct successor to the Indigo2, and itself was succeeded by the Tezro, and its immediate sibling was the O2. SGI withdrew the Octane2 from the price book on May 26, 2004, and ceased Octane2 production on June 25, 2004. Support for the Octane2 ceased in June 2009.

A new system named Octane III was introduced in early 2010. The Octane III is an Intel Xeon-based desk-side cluster system and should not be confused with the Octane and Octane2.

The Octane's system-board is designated as IP30. The system is based on SGI's Xtalk architecture. This means it does not use a system bus; instead it has a Crossbow application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), referred to as Xbow, a dynamic crossbar switch that connects the XIO ports to the hub. One of the ports is used for the processor and memory subsystem, one is available for PCI-X expansion and four are XIO slots (packet-based high-bandwidth bus, somewhat similar to HyperTransport). This makes it very similar to a single node of the Origin 200 system.

...
Wikipedia