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Tera Will Buy Cray Research
I just found this short news in C|Net which states that Tera Computer will buy Cray Research from SGI for an undisclosed amount of cash, stocks and notes (although the Wall Street Journal estimates the price that Tera pays is less then $100 million, which is a fraction compared to what SGI had to pay when they bought Cray - $740 million). Tera is going to change their company name to ... Cray.
I've been following SGI for quite a while now.. They began focusing on the x86 line as they figured the 64-bit Merced/Itanium/McKinney/[fill in the blank] would take over the marketplace sometime very soon for visual workstations.
On the high end market, they purchased Cray, and continued work on the Orion line of supercomputers.
Bad move buying Cray, bad move focusing on x86 64-bit imho. They had to get rid of Cray as it was becoming excess baggage. I may be wrong, but Intel is having trouble getting their 64-bit cpu higher than 400Mhz, while Alpha are laughing happily to the bank on their 21264 chipset, while working on their 21364 chipset (1000Mhz, 64-bit I believe). Sun continues working towards the UltraSparc-3 chipset (750Mhz 64-bit) and UltraSparc-5 chipset (1500Mhz 64-bit).
Perhaps SGI should stick to high end 32-bit x86 chips for their workstation line, and continue pumping out MIPS cpu's on the beautiful Origin line. I understand fazeing out IRIX, but really..
Where will it end? I love SGI products! Are they organized enough to provide me with a reliable long term gameplan, and be able to produce their servers in a timely manner?
EraseMe
When it comes down to it, this really isn't too surprising given what's going on in the market and what happened to CRI as it grew into middle age. The market forces are obvious: lots of computing problems that used to be in the exclusive domain of supercomputers have been assumed by much smaller computers. Budgets of large government agencies have been dramatically reduced and with them, a large customer base has disappeared. If you're trying to make money, this spells disaster.
Furthermore, like any organization, as they developed into more of a "sustained business" organization rather than a "let's build the fastest computer ever" organization, it became more and more difficult to innovate as rapidly as before (this is one of the reasons Seymour left). In the hey day of large government defense contracts, this was not a problem. However, as budgets dwindled they ran into significant difficulty penetrating new markets (a $30M machine is not an easy sell).
It's really too bad as they have done some really neat things. In some senses it was the ultimate geek environment. In the engineering tradeoffs, speed always wins (which is why the things are so darn expensive). They used different wires for memory reads and writes, high memory interleaving, the I/O subsystems are multiple computers tasked for nothing more than I/O, vector registers make large FP computation chains very fast, no virtual memory (you can't use what you ain't got). In most cases, if it was slow they threw H/W at it. And then there was materials research for cooling and lots of other cool stuff.
I don't know what Tera plans to do with them, but unless they have a good way to penetrate into the business markets (and there are opportunities), before long Cray will simply be a name for the history books. It's really too bad considering all the contributions they've made to the computing world.