Accelerator boards - no future? Bad business?

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Swift Griggs once stated:
> 
> Remember all the accelerator boards for the Mac, Amiga, and even PCs in the
> 90's ?  I've often wished that I could get something similar on my older SGI
> systems.  For example, fitting an R16k into an O2 or doing dynamic
> translation on a 4.0Ghz i7. 

  One major problem with adding a faster CPU to an SGI is the MIPS chip
itself---code compiled for one MIPS CPU (say, the R3000) won't run on
another MIPS CPU (say, the R4400) due to the differences in the pipeline. 
MIPS compilers were specific for a chip because such details were not hidden
in the CPU itself, but left to the compiler to deal with.

  -spc (Who had near exclusive use of an SGI in college in the early 90s)