Following of its Unix underpinnings, these are capable of super yearn uptime, and its XFS filesystem is regarded to be one of a virtually all advanced journaling file systems in the industry.

IRIX has particularly heavy trend lines for 3D graphics, video & high-bandwidth bulk information transport. IRIX was one of the foremost Unix flavors to feature a GUI for the main desktop environment, & is widely utilized in the computer animation industry and for scientific visualization due to its extremely high 3D graphics performance. IRIX utilizes a IRIX Interactive Desktop with its default 4dwm window manager and Motif widget toolkit with a custom look & sense.

A todays major version of IRIX is IRIX 6.Pentad. Recently minor versions come freed each quarter. As much as & including Version 6.Quintet.Xxii, there were deuce branches of both release: the maintenance release that includes sole fixes to the original IRIX 6.Fivesome code, & the feature release that includes improvements & sweetening. When of August 2005, the todays minor version of IRIX is IRIX 6.Phoebe.Xxviii. Versions higher until a Hexad.Cinque.Xxii maintenance release come available gratis download, Hexad.Pentad.Xxiii & higher postulate an active Silicin Graphics trend lines contract, despite single heading on Silicon Graphics devices.

Rumour abound that SGI plans to end-of-life it along with MIPS in favor of Linux on Itanium, but SGI engineers in Usenet have stated this will non happen anytime shortly.