#high impact

SGI High IMPACT Graphics (1995)

SGI Indigo2 IMPACT systems were the best workstations for game development and other activities involving textured 3D rendering in 1995. My system is equipped with High IMPACT Graphics, which is a two-card solution with a dedicated geometry engine (one million triangles/s), raster engine with two pixel processors (two pixel per cycle, 60-70 textured Mpixels/s), 12MB of pixel memory and a single texture-mapping unit with its own 1MB of texture memory.

The high-end option was called Maximum IMPACT Graphics. It took three slots in the computer and doubled the rasterisation performance by using exactly the same principle that was later used by 3Dfx Voodoo2 SLI (scan line interleaving).

The 3D performance of SGI Indigo2 IMPACT was years ahead of PCs and other workstations. In fact, 3Dfx Voodoo2, the best gaming 3D accelerator for PCs in 1998, had similar performance to High IMPACT graphics but unlike the IMPACT series, it didn’t support windowed rendering, 32-bit color precision and high resolutions.

The last two photos show Indigo2 IMPACT systems during the development of Final Fantasy VII (source: Sony press kit).

High impact, low probability events are events that have an extremely bad outcome or consequence but have a low probability of occurring.

Events include:

natural disasters

Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event

An asteroid or comet collided into the Earth resulting in the death of around three quarters of all life on Earth

2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami 

A large earthquake of magnitude 9.1 struck the east coast of Japan. This was one of the most costly earthquakes at 360 billion USD

major terrorist attacks

September 11 attacks

hijackers took control of 4 different planes with all of them directed at different targets, this lead to a total of 2996 deaths

large oil spills

deep water horizon

nuclear war

nuclear reactor meltdown

Chernobyl disaster

major pandemic

Spanish flu

an unusually deadly influenza virus which lead to 500 million people being infected, leading to 50 to 100 million deaths

These types of events are the hardest to make plans for yet events absolutely need to be planned for accordingly.