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SGI Sets Sights On Turnaround
grub wrote to us about an article about SGI, and its ongoing battles to turn its corporate fortunes around. The company's been doing interesting stuff for a long time - here's to hoping they stay around.
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..second isn't quite as good.
If they want a turn around - get the old name back for a start.. It always was Silicon Graphics for me, not a nameless TLA...
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
what about bronze? At least we get medals -Admin SplashBlob
I think SGI was better off when they only made IRIX/MIPS-based systems. I don't know why they started to make WINTEL systems anyway...seems like such a waste...
I'm really surprised that linux wasn't mentioned a single time in this article, despite that fact that the competitive landscape of hollwywood rendering farms was "analyzed". Seems very fishy, considering that SGI is putting alot of man hours into making linux more enterprise ready, and leveraging it into commodity servers.
.... Or am I reading SGI wrong? What is SGI's relationship to linux, and why doesn't this article mention linux once? Just wondering.
it's just a preview of some new special-effects that SGI is showing off...
shouldn't it be posted in another area? come on
Unfortunately, the economics of a capitalist society are changing things, and the results are a mixed bag. On one hand, far fewer professional programmers will be employed, full time, to develop open source software that everyone can use for free. On the other hand, though, Corporate America will no longer control key parts of the Linux development effort. As it stands right now, many Linux coders are dependent on corporations for their paychecks; and these corporations choose which projects the open source coders get to work on, and how those projects are to develop. The funding is always welcome, but it has come at the expense of independence from the capitalist society that we shun. Linux was never about money; it was about coders developing the best product they can out of pride and the desire to make their hard work available to everyone.
Companies like SGI, Corel, and LNUX have corrupted the open source ideal. Money is power and power corrupts. Although SGI's contributions to Linux development cannot be understated, nor can their influence be ignored. And when they inevitably go out of business, it will be another nail in the coffin of high end computer graphics, and another notch for freedom in the axe of the open source movement. But life is often bittersweet.
Bill
The Silicon Valley article mentions SGI's recent military involvement, but you can also check out this article from CNN which provides a few more interesting details.
forma3
Willard said the company's exit from the commodity NT server business was a good one. Its current strategy, to focus on its proprietary, high-end systems running Irix, its version of the Unix operating system and Linux, makes sense.
Hmm, must be a misplaced comma. They offer systems running Linux, but I'm fairly certain that Irix doesn't contain GPLed code. Good move getting away from the NT market.
Since SGI obviously has some workings in the field of graphics and chip manufacturing, what if they were to join up with one of the companies like Nvidia or AMD? We could see some much more powerful chips at much lower prices if they did that. They could even write Linux/open source drivers, making the hardware much more compatable with different machines.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Its due to their great songs! get them while their hot. SGI is #15 and they have 5 songs.
"i have a dream, and it's called a graphics pipe/ it really works, and it's not just pc hype".
SGI used to be a real innovator in the field of graphics. Now it seems like companies like ATI and Nvidia are actaully doing more for that field.
I've been thouroughly unimpressed with SGI in recent years.
-Evan.
I used to demo software for an SGI dealer, and learned to loath the company. The special hard drive mounting bracket for an Indy would cost more than the drive. The knob box cost $1500. Nutty prices.
But the thing that sealed their doom was when they didn't take the opportunity offered by Nintendo purchasing a huge number of R4000 chips. They could have taken the volumes offered by this to start selling MIPS chips to PC video card makers. They could have owned the entire video card market, and not suffered the brain drain that found all their best people working for competitors. Instead, their fat-cat sales force ruled against that move. They liked selling expensive workstations and servers to big clients for big bucks.
If they had played this card correctly, Nvidia would have never happened. Who wouldn't have wanted a "Silicon Graphics" game card? Instead, they were stupid greedy and they'll die. And they'll deserve to die.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Anyway, I hope they stay in business. Their web site is the easiest place to remember when you need to look up something in the STL Programmer's Reference.
It's good to here some good news come from SGI... I've been a fan of pretty much everything that they've ever done. I find Irix to have the sweetest desktop out there of any Unixes I've ever used (Gnome and KDE pundits may repectfully disagree). Hell, even the cases they put their machines in are works of art.
Anyway, although I am rather happy to hear that they will be recieving a financial shot in the arm from the new wave of government spending, I am a little worried, given the track record for stability of Irix, that these machines will be running fighter jets (can anyone say kernel panic at 30,000 feet)?
- Consumer-grade video hardware has quickly outpaced SGI's best
offerings. A GeForce3 has the same processing power as their best
offerings from just two years ago, and doesn't cost as much as a new
car.
- Management issues cripple the company. The lack of profits through the
year 2000 weren't a result of low demand; they were a result of running a
bloated, disorganized company that didn't know what their resources were
or how to use them.
- Morale is at an all-time low. Coupled with the fact that the market
for high end hardware is very weak headed into 2002, they are going to have
at least a few more rough quarters.
- Expenses are killing them. They spend millions of dollars a year
supporting Windows NT clients, open source efforts, and R&D into doomed
technologies like the Itanium. Since few of these things will ever pay off
in our lifetime, the money is as good as wasted.
The market has spoken, and the message is clear: proprietary technologies are on the way out. Even Sun, the mother of all vendor lock-in schemes, has started to use standard PC components in building their machines. SGI can still sell to their niche market, but they need to severely narrow their focus and cut a good deal of fat before they can be profitable again.df
Other than its ability to run on cheap (price and often quality) hardware, I still don't understand SGI's movement to Linux. I guess that I am showing my ignorance here, but it seems to me that Apple and SGI are in similar situations right now in some respects. Both companies historically have relied on income from the hardware side of things while making a closed OS/hardware system that for each of their respective markets is very effective. The difference between Apple and SGI however is that SGI already has a UNIX OS with a GUI (however difficult it is to manage but VERY extensible and powerful), and Apple is developing UNIX with a GUI (easier to manage, more powerful in some respects, etc etc etc...). Both companies need major transitions to survive, but why Linux/Intel? IRIX is already mature, stable, fast, with great graphics capabilities and IO capabilities, so I ask again, why move to Linux and Intel?
Both companies obviously want to benefit from the open source paradigm while still remaining in business with proprietary OS's. (I am guessing here for SGI as I assume that they will make their OS on a proprietary linux model) The approach Apple is taking certainly makes sense to me by developing a UNIX OS that includes the opensource Darwin, but I am totally clueless as to what SGI is doing here. What makes Linux more attractive than simply continuing to develop IRIX and putting more effort into improving, simplifying some features, and pushing development for IRIX on perhaps less expensive hardware? (among other changes to their business model) Again it seems to me that SGI is making another crucial mistake here as the developers that have tapered off work for IRIX have not for the most part started developing for Linux (although I know of a few examples), primarily they have lost ground to Wintel. (thus
their misguided attempt at Wintel/SGI boxes I guess)
In short it appears that they are trying to make Linux/Intel into what they already have in IRIX/MIPS, only with cheaper hardware which seems awfully dangerous to me for both end users and the company.
I believe that by 2005 SGI will no longer be in the low to mid-range workstation market. This market will belong to perhaps Linux/Intel or OSX/PowerPC. Right now for what my maintenance contracts cost me for a single SGI Octane, I can purchase a new G4 WITH a 22in Cinema display YEARLY! This is not even talking about the $40k initial acquisition costs.
SGI will survive in the server market and high end visualization market if they are not acquired by someone else. After all SGI's market cap is only around 585 million last time I checked.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
this is totally ot, so mod down as appropriate. -1 would be ideal, since this article has already been ruined.
I can't imagine anything more losing than sitting and waiting for new slashdot news you can ruin. Some of your posts are undeniably funny, though.
What aren't funny are your posts that fuck up the page. Page lengthening. How amusing. I'm very impressed that you can get past the lameness filter, and I'm sure you feel you've accomplished something. Go you.
These posts leave me no choice but to browse at 0. There are some posts that get modded down unfairly, and I end up missing them. Thanks bunches.
This may be among the more pointless bitches of all time, I know, but I felt like bitching.
there's more than one way to do me.
SGI is caught in the classic problem that killed DEC, and is killing Tandem, Stratus, DG, and many others: the performance of the lowend is improving so quickly that we can do things on $1K machines that used to require $1M machines.
I have a friend who had an idea that could have saved them. When he was at SGI, he pointed out that machines that were optimized for graphics had to have great I/O performance, which would also make them great performers in another I/O intensive task: running RDMS engines like Oracle and Sybase. SGI management wasn't interested.
So, SGI employees and stockholders lose out, and the rest of us gain another lesson in the dangers of rigid thinking.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
On September 13th I was looking at SGI's stock at $0.33 a share, and I was thinking about buying some of it.
I thought that the company had good prospects, even though it was failing at customer service, shipping ordered products, selling short and losgin a lot of money on a number of their x86 intel-based workstations.
They had built some amazing supercomputers for the national weather service, providing boxes for render farms for final fantasy, monster inc., and a bunch of other movie prodcutions (sorry, no time to look for links).
It seemed that it was the 'market analysts' and some disrgruntled customers and amazingly a lot of fear of 'restructuring' the company, that brought the stock price so low.
Somehow, I ended up not buying any. Now their stock is at around $2.14 a share.
I will be kicking my ass till I die that I didn't buy those shares.
It definately shows how much hype goes into inflating or deflating the stock prices and might not show the actual company value, performance, or ability to bring money to the stockholders.
I believe that SGI will come out on top after all.
Just idle speculation on my part. Sun is more of a pure-play Unix vendor, and thus might seem more appropriate as a takeover initiator, but I don't think their financial reserves are high enough to do it. Further, they're more of a "one-os, one-platform" company than IBM and would probably have a harder time assimilating the SGI folks/products.
Jeez, if SGI goes tits up, how many Unix (commercial) vendors will be left? Both HP and Compaq seem to be treating their unix offerings as an afterthought compated to cheap shitty PCs and winprinters. I guess just Solaris and AIX. God save us all from AIX being the only Unix out there...;-)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
SGI is a very big business in terms of CGI and I really hope they don't collapse since they were always the one who discovered break-throughs in graphical technology.
or at least, their reputation for such.
One place I worked at had SGI webservers/application servers alongside SUN equivalents. The SGIs had approximately an order of magnitude higher failure rate. Granted, this was their low-end systems, but it wasn't encouraging -- and many sites would try low end systems first to get the feel of a company's products.
Yes, I definitely agree that SGI has done some killer things. They revolutionized the graphics industry and demonstrated that computers can be made to do visual effects never dreamed of. Their systems are powerful tools for research. All in all, they've been quite swell.
But, we don't need them anymore. Nor do we want them.
SGI offers big, expensive, proprietary solutions, that like Microsoft, lock you into their product line with little or no hope of escape. Let's discuss the reasons.
1. Lack of extensibility. SGI boxen typically do not scale well, and if they do, much of your hardware has to be replaced to accomplish any scaling. Ever try to upgrade an Indy? And O2!? I certainly understand that in any upgrade, sacrifices of existing hardware must be made, but they are no champions of modularity.
2. Proprietary hardware. SGI hardware, for its consumer price-level equivalents is not all that great. You can spend $16,000 on one or maybe two decent SGI systems, or you can buy 10-15 high-powered PC's and cluster them. You get the advantages of redundancy too. Another problem here is repair work. Nobody but SGI and SGI certified technicians can repair their hardware. Worse still, only SGI and a few licensed vendors manufacture SGI hardware replacements. More money here. And then there is Irix...
3. Proprietary OS and software. Irix is a disgrace. Certainly, it's a great performer, but because it's geared specifically to SGI hardware. Take Linux and optimise it to the same level and write good drivers, and you'd have not just a strong contender, but a superior OS. However, it's just not there and SGI doesn't want it to be. They're too proud of their OS and they want Irix tools to remain Irix-only so SGI software vendors can't take their products to other markets without tough costs. Since everyone does servers these days, SGI doesn't mind having Linux run on Challenge or other volume servers. Besides, everyone who wants Big Iron for www.hugefuckingcompany.com uses Sun anyway.
All in all, what SGI does for huge costs can be done in the PC scene with a fraction of the price. Perhaps not in Linux yet, but certainly in Windows with products from NewTek and ReelMagic for example. With nVidia around pumping out killer graphics hardware, what do we really need SGI for? I guess the only reason I can see is that they produce big solutions (who else will build a C.A.V.E. for you?). Can anyone clue me in on what it is exactly SGI does that we can't do everywhere else these days?
Why bother.
i'm not so impressed that sgi's "recovery" is basically linked to war-based activities. here, outside the usa, many people roll their eyes when they hear about how much the usa spends "in the interest of national security" (read "keeping the rest of the world as fucked as possible") and how few americans benefit from this (for example, those with shares in SGI and the other big companies who benefit from war-making). i don't really care who makes the soft-tech (missile guidance software for example) or the hard-tech (cruise milliles) -- they're the same type of sucker on the ass of real americans. oh wait, i don't see any real americans on my yankee-doodle-ized media, so maybe they don't exist ...
- where are you on the theory-reality continuum?
Enough is enough. Stick to fantasizing about Natalie Portman and grits. That was at least original and funny!
I agree, the page lengthening crap is highly annoying. You have succeeded in pissing us all off.
Here's a poster of Natalie and a bowl of grits... Please go play somewhere else for a while.
I really don't understand how anyone can take this seriously. All these plans must be imaginary, since SGI has cancelled reality. It was a big story here some months ago.
karma capped
Hemos: Guide to usage, its vs. it's.
"It's" is a contraction of "it is". I know "'s" implies possession, and it would seem that the way to construct "belonging to it" is to tack "'s" onto the end, but that's simply not the case.
"Its" means "belonging to it". Think of it as the neuter version of the masculine "his" and the feminine "her" (the genitive "her", not the accusative "her"), neither of which has an apostrophe.
Does it make any more intuitive sense now?
This looks pretty cool and I'm thinking it's the workstation that someone else mentioned will be based on the Origin 3000 architecture. Pretty cool. If OpenGL code ports to IRIX easily, then I think I'll be entering. Looks like you need to be present to win, good thing I'm in the SF Bay area!
http://www.sgi.com/developers/
SGI has always had a hard time trying to market itself. They've typically made endless incorrect assumptions and end up preaching to the choir. And yet, the wow factor that made the company and it's little cube logo a legend in the late 1980s is still there, abeit in a slightly different manner.
True, not everyone needs 512 or 1024 CPUs running on a single system under a single kernel. Or 16 graphics pipelines. But there are those that do. Which is why, shortly after the introduction of the Origin 3000 two years ago, an entire convoy of the machines were sent to Fort Meade.
It's almost as though SGI has gotten used to the high end, as though their technology (HW, SW, APIs, SDKs) no longer impress themsleves. Nowhere else, not even E&S, can a person find a platform that can drive up to 128 display channels (16 pipes x 8 channels per pipe) with perfect sync, or even at all. O2K and O3K (and more recently, O300 and Octane2) can drive multiple displays from one or more graphics pipelines. Raw, per-CPU performance isn't anything to write home about, but the thruput and latencies are perfect for generating insane 3D and mixing it with streams of HDTV... or anything. Think of a way-cool use of video and 3D. Now increase the complexity and choose, oh, 4 camera viewpoints. Maybe an additional display for stats and another for an "operators station". Easy with O2K/O3K (aka "Onyx" when gfx are invloved). It can be done and it's proven. They've been doing this sort of thing since you and I were using our "cutting edge" unaccelerated 2D graphics cards running at an "insane" 1024x768.
A pair of old demos SGI likes to show off are sometimes called "from space to your face", in which over 500 GB of sat photo textures are shuffled thru one or more InfiniteReality graphics pipes to provide a realtime "bungie jump" from the moon to earth and back. INSANE. 60fps/60hz locked. 4 huge disk RAIDs composed of dozens of drives grinding away like mad to keep the textures coming. WILD STUFF. All in a day's work.
SGI isn't about buzzwords or about wizbang marketing. It's about providing modular solutions to some of the most challenging problems. They've been there to provide HW and SW to those wishing to work on the cutting edge. In 1988 they were selling 3D workstations. In 1991 folks were doing crazy 3D and video mixing. Today their hardware can be used to drive gobs of displays and to shuffle huge amounts of data. Sure, the desktop PC in 2007 will be able to do the same thing. By then, PCs will be able to drive gobs of high end gfx subsystems, and even a cheap graphics card won't sneeze at several GB of textures loading and unloading every second... but until then, for those that need this TODAY, there's SiliconGraphics.
Let's hope SGI is here tomorrow to show us even more cool things.
In all honesty, I have never had a problem with IRIX stability. I have only experienced two kernel panics: one was related to failing hardware, the other to a brand-new graphics subsystem that had a major known bug (and subsequently fixed in the next quarterly OS release... there may already even been a patch for it at the time).
Thinking back on IRIX history, only a few issues come to mind... ballooning RAM usage starting with IRIX 5.X (gee, IRIX swaps to disk on machines with less than 32 MB of RAM) and patch dependancy hell starting with IRIX 4.X but fixed in 1998 with the IRIX 6.5.X quarterly release stream. There have been a few minor regressions over the years and some software issues with brand-new hardware, but almost all have been fixed within a month or two. Anyone deploying mission-critical hardware will fully test their setup before deployment and work closely with the vendor. Heck, I would trust IRIX just as much as any other UNIX flavor... maybe even moreso. As with any other OS, stability issues should be worked out with the vendor, not ignored.
Knock Knock Knock -- anyone home?
Why isn't SGI trumpeting around telling (and showing!) the world that they are still the king of massive visualization?? For the most part, SGI is no longer a performance leader on the desktop, or for anything running on a single display or on fewer than 4 CPUs. But... SGI is all about the "big data". Nobody else can even come close to their offerings for single large systems or multi-pipe graphics. Nobody else can drive as many displays or such a diverse set of display technologies from one single machine. 2D, 3D, SD video, HD video... several streams of each. One monitor, two monitors... 8 projectors, each with a different point-of-view... all genlocked and in stereo. No problem for SGI. But does the world know about this? No.
SGI has been licked on the desktop, but they are still THE LEADER in display centers. Hell, even the best CAVE is childs play for a modern multipipe SGI. And this is on InfiniteReality class graphics. SGI killed one potential successor to IR several years ago. The stuff that's to come will be even hotter and support even more channels. It's wild, but they act like is a secret.
Bali and Odyssey -- Two reasons right there why we no longer use SGI (and really, why we're now in a totally different line of business).
When we bought our first Octanes in 1997, we were excited about the totally new gfx due in "about 18 months". Shucks, the only upgrade we got for YEARS was the simple "e series" speed tweak. By the time Odyssey gfx (VPro) shipped, we had already shifted gears and changed platforms.
Same goes for Onyx2 and its graphics. At the time we bought our first Onyx2, it came with original IR (InfiniteReality) graphics. We were told that IR2 was due soon, and to be followed by something totally groundbreaking (Bali). Hell, Bali never did ship. Bali was never even finished. Here we are at the end of 2001 and the current high end graphics offering is just IR3, another minor speed boost.
SGI can build some damned impressive machines, offering GOBS of thruput--bandwidth from hell. But what can we use it for? Only Bill Gates could afford enough disk subsystems to swamp that much bandwidth, and person can only make use of so many HDTV I/O streams. My company used to work on "photorealistic" 3D simulations for a wide variety of clients. Over the years we had used and abused many different platforms, constantly desiring more performance. Our Onyx2 systems served us well, but the lack of a real graphics upgrade left us scratching for more. We tried E&S, we tried 3DLbas, we tried nVidia. Some speed boosts, many new features, but total kluges when it came to driving more than one display or trying to feed the graphics pipeline. For us, there really was no solution. SGI canceled Bali and the only other alternatives were halfbaked. After a stint with non-realtime (rendered) graphics, we eventually branched off into the world of physics sims.
Cutting edge graphics, where did you go? Please tell me there's more to the 3D world than IR, WildCat II, and GeForce3. Has *nothing* (other than cost) really changed over the past five years? It's almost as though I haven't missed anything in the 28 months I've been away from 3D.
SGI's dirty little secret is that it has SOLD all of it's graphics patents to Microsoft for $62.5 million. They haven't informed anyone of this except in the most vague and general terms.
God knows what's next, it seems like the death spiral will only continue, they are carrying a lot of debt and are still losing cash. Even when selling the family silver they burn through cash like it was firewood. Their board and management really are miserably incompetent.
I've always liked Apple as a suitor to SGI.
Apple won't or can't compete in the commodity corporate desktop world and trying to expand that market would be a waste of time and money. The niche markets they do dominate, such as print production, are suffering to some extent from stagnation. The markets aren't growing bigger and with the general softness in the ad markets, I can tell you (as an ad industry employee) that budgets to replace B&W G3s with G4s wholesale aren't going to be there like they were 2-3 years ago when G3s rapidly replaced earlier PPC Macs -- there's little end user demand and ZERO management push.
Buying SGI would provide Apple with an entry into a world of higher-end computing than they currently have and would enable them to provide a much more vertically integrated solution to markets that are somewhat out of reach for them in terms of software and hardware -- high end film production, animation, and scientific visualization. From a technology perspective, it would give a credibility boost to Apple's nascent Unix and allow them to have hardware unified by a single OS.
It may be arguable that Apple's credibility in creative circles, early-to-market product offerings, and increasingly high performance machines will give it the bottom third of the video production market by default, and that SGIs technology is rapidly being obsoleteed by commodity hardware.
However, I don't think that there's nearly the growth prospect in desktop video that there was in desktop publishing or the huge edge over x86, either. And own its own, Apple still can't escape the low-end niche it sits in.
SGI need to bring the silicon grafic name back, buy back BeOS from Palm, build hardware accelerated voxel+raytracing video card. All that around cheap PC part (exept for the video part)
A pretty, curvy plastic case with the SGI logo prominently displayed, and they could probably compete with Dell for workstation products, while adding 10-15% just for the name.
I work in video games. Many of us, especially my artist coworkers, have worked with SGI extensively in the past. They miss the SGI platform, many with a fondness on par with that of the typical Linux, Mac or Amiga fanatic. And these people do have a voice when it comes to purchasing. If these guys thought they could get "An SGI that runs Windows," but at a sane price (they missed this part with their Windows endeavors), they'd jump on it.
Hell, I'd probably get one too, just for the novelty of it. A bona-fide SGI running Linux just feels cooler than generic PC hardware, even if I know the internals are identical.
There's probably a lot of money to be made in selling branded PC hardware. When Gateway bought Amiga, they could have probably sold thousands more units just by replacing front panels with something stylish and Amiga-esque, flashing a set of BIOSes with a snazzy "Amiga Phoenix" or similar logo & tossing a UAE CD and a Boing! mug in the box. There was no need for them to look into reinventing the PC, just like it was silly of SGI to go about trying to reinvent the PC when they tried shipping Windows products. Commodity hardware is rocketing forward so fast that most any attempt at creating custom hardware for your own PC products is purely daft. It's all about presentation.
Certainly, pretty cases wouldn't have to be SGI's only business line, but it could certainly be a source of safe & easy revenue to help turn things around.
... started the day they started charging for the
'C' compiler. Good-bye IBM, HP, SCO, SGI, DEC, etc. Viva Linux!
I haven't read the above article but SGI will never die because its too important to the US military.
Its like the US having no gun makers or no airplane makers. The military needs a domestic supplier.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
In 1994 I was working for a big company where an SGI salesman came in and gave us exactly this pitch. He said that if they had enough I/O bandwidth to animate dinosaurs (referring to the original Jurassic Park), they had plenty of bandwidth for DB apps, and claimed Yahoo! as an early company who had bought in to the idea (at one time, Yahoo! and Netscape were big SGI shops).
It's bizarre to hear that your friend was behind the curve of what the salesfolk were pitching.
I find Irix to have the sweetest desktop out there of any Unixes I've ever used (Gnome and KDE pundits may repectfully disagree). Hell, even the cases they put their machines in are works of art.
Sigh. And every CS student I've got interning for me says I'm a clueless pansy for using an iMac with OS X at home.
Double standards rock, eh?
--saint
Both HP and Compaq seem to be treating their unix offerings as an afterthought compated to cheap shitty PCs and winprinters.
A friend of mine just ordered a copy of Tru64 for the Alpha he bought on eBay -- took him almost an hour to explain to the Compaq sales droid on the phone what Tru64 was and what hardware it ran on.
When pretty much every architecture but the PowerPC and the x86 went tits-up, I knew things were getting bad. But when someone from the company that now owns DEC didn't know what "Unix" was, that's when I realized how boring this industry has really gotten.
--saint
SGI has created the file alteration monitor and ported it to linux. (This shows up as '/etc/xinetd.d/sgi_fam' in RH7.2.) This allows apps to request a central daemon to monitor files and directories for modification, so that the apps can be notified when this happens. I've started playing with this and it looks cool. This helps provide real-time auditing of file activities on critical files - helps mollify the security types, which is important in a corporate setting.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
for my pee cee?
Hell, "graphics" is in their name! What's wrong with giving NVidia and ATI a little competition, especially at the gamer and prosumer level? How about a sub $1,000 card that does digital video in and out, accelerates OpenGL with *precision* and spanks NVidia at games?
Hell they can tweak on of their old boards and milk it all it's worth. And it shouldn't cut into their fat margin business.
they sure had a nice finder and environment, especially for the day.
i've heard the main reason for migrating to Linux is a variety of shortcomings in the Unix/Irix code base that are irreperable, but not too sure about that.
i think it would be neat for them to have a partnership with Sony and make a hot-rod linux/MIPS PS2 and put the SGI badge on it.
My gut feeling is that the PC box makers are going to be under a huge cloud as Microsoft starts using next generation Xboxes to get around the court ordered OEM restrictions.
that makes the low-end market very open to ew styles and configurations of consoles.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
SGI keeps making mistake after mistake. I don't see how they have a snowball's chance in hell unless they axe their entire marketing team.
They came out with a pretty nice IA32 Linux workstation, the 330. Performance was good, the graphics smoked the O2's, and old IRIX customers were interested in porting to Linux. The machines were a little more expensive than what you could get from Dell, but SGI was fully supporting their machines. They provided documentation and APIs to help customers port from IRIX to Linux. The extent of Dell Linux support is "it should work on our machines."
The government and special effects industries have been two of SGI's biggest customers for years. Not only did SGI kill their IA32 Linux line before the government had a chance to buy them (the bulk of government spending comes at the end of the government's fiscal year. SGI dropped the 330 about a month before then), they killed their Linux line a couple of months before ILM decided to dump 600 O2 workstations in favor of Linux boxes.
They kept the 330 on the market for less than one year. People who wanted to get SGI AI32 Linux workstations never had an opportunity to buy them. If they had just kept their 330's on the market for another 3 months, they would have been selling them like hotcakes to former IRIX shops.
They're doomed. They've effectively handed away the Linux graphics workstation market to Dell, HP and custom shops.
"Good people drink good beer"
We were running a a series of O2K's when our main software vendor said they supported us, not SGI. So we were given a time table to move to the new Corp Dictate, SUN. Our Sun system will be comparable to the IRIX system, once we get up to Soalris 8, and replace our E450's with something that can handle the load, like a 6800's, and once we double our networks because Sun can't handle the number of connections. I don't want to even mention internal bandwidth issues or ecache issues. It's enough to make a unix admin switch to Oracle.
bring back the Silicon Graphics name!it seems that my indigo 2 now belongs to a company that dosent exist anymore. and besides there old logo is much much better than just SGI!
Whiz-bang graphics goes over great with the majors and generals in times of peace, when VR training is the only kinda combat experience the kids are going to see (thank god).
But even then Duke Nukem beat the pants off of Army MODSAF running on an SGI for urban combat training. Why was that? Big cushy military contracts don't necessarily create the best product for the job, that's why.
Now SGI thinks it's going to return to the good old days of impressing majors and generals with wiz-bang graphics, and being able to charge through the nose -- but that's not what's going to happen.
Why? Two reasons:
Anyway, what killed SGI wasn't so much their market position -- it was their shite compilers that *never* kept up with gcc, and complete lack of compatibility with *anything* else in the *nix world.
you're joking, right?
all the engineers left in 1996.
now they want to sell linux/ia64 boxes, because it's a potential money maker they can still get at without actually having any engineers.
that's interesting?
The ignoarance of /. readers amazes me. SGI's big business is in military applications and they generate billions of dollars of revenue from this.
Some of the posts here claiman nVidia solution on todays PC's can compete with SGI. Not on your life. I have seen demos of SGI workstations capturing and morphing video in real time..ie stretching a face and all subsequent captured frames keep the stretched aspect. Absolutely truly amazing stuff and you are not going to do this with some off the shelf capture card and any $300 Nvidia card.
And to the Linux howler monkeys. IRIX is a RTOS, Linux is not and until there is Real Time Lixux, Linux is not even in the same league.
SGI flew high when tech on Wall Street menat innovatation and computers doing amazing things. Wall Sstreet redefined tech to mean AOL, MSFT and consumer grade crap. SGI was pressured into offering wintel platforms intot he consumer market to appease the Wall Street analysts. Well it is a good thing that everyone found out how much of jackasses Wall Street analysts were and technology gems like SGI just might shine bright again.
I'm curious... any specific reason for the "fF"-artifact -- conscious, or software-caused?
i think you need to update the logo :)
at one time sgi had a passion for acquiring other companies (cray, etc), did they also own mips at one time? and could the whole acquisition and former micorosft man stumble be attributed to sgi's downfall?
SGI has changed direction so many times in the past five years (moving into servers, deemphasizing graphics, selling NT workstations, deemphasizing servers, dumping the NT workstation line, reemphasizing graphics, acquiring Intergraph's line of overpriced NT workstations...) that customers can't rely on them following through on anything. And that doesn't even include the Cray acquisition and dismantling.
I noticed the remark in the article: "In its cost-cutting measures, SGI sold its nine buildings and leased back six of them." That's so SGI. This is right after they finished the new, zowie HQ building in Mountain View, and emptied out the fancy Silicon Studios building.
One big SGI success is Alias/Wavefront's Maya. That's one of the very few examples in the history of high-tech when a company bought two technology companies and actually got them to work together. Maya was a major advance, and dethroned Softimage|3D as the lead package in high-end animation. That's an incredible result from a merger.
Of course, they had to sell Maya on NT to make any money. So it didn't do much for SGI's hardware business.
Why is this comment moderated to -1? It is not a troll. Rather, it is someone expressing his view on a particular situation that is relevant to the post it is attached to. Please, someone with moderation points mod this up at least a little bit...
You're a meta-moderation terrorist. Not to mention a complete fucking cocksmoking fuckwad. I mean, where the FUCK do you get off meta-moderating negative ratings as unfair? Are you saying things like Klerck's page-lengthening posts should be left at a default posting level of 1 (which it would be, if nobody moderated down).
/. story submission. After the first 24 hours, you're probably looking at a ballpark figure of 200-400 replies. Often in this range, you'll get anywhere between 0 and 10 posts that get moderated up to a score 4 or 5. By this time, the default reading level collapses posts of 3 points or less, and filters AC's who have start with a score of 0.
And the risk of feeding a hungry troll, let me justify why I don't give credit to moderators who waste their points on people like you.
First of all, take your average
Now, given that when you are chosen to do a moderation on this system, you get five points. If you pick 5 good posts, you can raise all 5 of them above the cacophony of the discussion. However, if you take your 5 points, and find 5 trolls out of hundreds, you accomplish absolutely nothing but indirectly censor 5 people who deserve to have their comments read.
I've seen dozens of really awesome, insightful posts that only made it to 3, and thus get collapsed (making reading more of a hassle), but in the same forum, there are some trolls with a whole lot of negative moderations. (They ONLY have to be modded down ONCE people, and they don't lose more karma after they've hit -1.) So, as you can see, moderating ANYONE down is inherently unfair because it only hurts the people who post intelligent comments.
Think about it.
Why bother.
This poster is a waste of skin ...
While I can't speak for the OS, you can get the full compiler and debugger suite as part of "DeveloperPlus" membership.
SGI has two levels to the developer program: DeveloperOnline and DeveloperPlus. The former for anyone (gives access to info online), and the latter to those meeting certain criteria. Both are free, but only DeveloperPlus includes the goodies.
Before you get discouraged, keep in mind that the requirements for DeveloperPlus were written with businesses in mind and don't really apply to Joe Student. **BUT** SGI is willing to make exceptions to hobbyists and students that could make use of the commercial compilers and tools (MIPSpro C, C++, F77, F90... ProDev Workshop [speedshop, etc]). The fellow that helped me is Robert Green, green@sgi.com. Fill out the DeveloperPlus application (www.sgi.com/developers) the best you can, then email Robert and explain your situation. No promises, but it's worth a shot.
And for those looking for gcc, GNOME, etc... hop on over to http://freeware.sgi.com. Most is for IRIX 6.5, but in their FTP site is an archive of the freeware site from about a year ago, when everything worked fine on 6.2 and up.
Hope this helps...
The MIPS R4k chip is a CPU, not a graphics processor. I have a PDA with an R4k as well, but they don't do 3d. It wouldn't really have made much sense to put them on GFX cards. Sorry to burst your bubble.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
So, one billion dollars is "rougly zero"? (4g cash + 25g owed = 29g total)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If I want a new Compaq or HP, I can go to the other Evil Empire (wal-mart) or to some electronic retailer. If I want a Dell or IBM, I can hop on their website and configure one (which you can do on SGI's website) and then purchase it right there (which you can't do on SGI's site).
With SGI, you have to go through salesmen. How many of you want to put up with that?
- Port IRIX to the Itanium. Expensive, and not a good way to grow their customer base. People who prefer IRIX will want to run it on MIPS-based systems anyway.
- NT. License fees, scalability. They've actually done an NT workstation or two, but the market was underwealmed. SGI just no longer has a role in the low-end workstation market.
- Linux. No license fees. There are scalability issues here too, but the source is open, and the Linux community is more than happy to accomodate SGI's needs. Especially after they contributed a few nice toys, like XFS.
Before the layoffs, I would have pointed out that SGI's customer support division is one of the few operations making actual money, so perhaps they hope to sell support and integration contracts for other people's hardware. When I worked there two years ago, all the support people were studying every Linux distro they could find, not just SGI Linux. But that division was hit bad by the layoffs. Perhaps Linux support isn't the cash cow they'd hopped. Perhaps they just needed to get their head count down, and screw the business plan.The SGI C and C++ compilers are quite ISO standards conformant, and SGI takes me seriously when I report minor transgressions.
The overall optimization levels of the compilers is very good. There are a couple of constructs that gcc does better, but only a few, and SGI takes all the other bouts.
SGI's checking for invalid, non-standard, and depreciated constructs, is much better than gcc's. SGI's compilers often find many errors in programs that pass gcc's checking completely cleanly. These are not spurious warnings, either: I have hardcopies of the C and C++ standards, and the problems highlighted by the SGI compilers are real ones.
It is true, though, that SGI's compilers "never kept up with gcc" -- when what you are talking about is extensions to the language. SGI does not tend to impliment the latest gcc-isms.
SGI's compilers have been well-suited to my workplace -- but then our policy is to create clean standards-conformant code, avoiding non-portable extensions.
SGI's IRIX is a hybrid of BSD and System V. I have had very little trouble in importing a wide variety of applications-level code, or lower-level code that makes an attempt to be standards conformant. Again, though, SGI does not particularily attempt to imitate the latest Linux kernel mods.
If riding the forefront of gcc and Linux changes is what is important to you, then IRIX will undoubtedly seem quite pedestrian. For us, IRIX functions spendidly as a tool -- a tool we can rely on to work very solidly to underpin our scientific work. We want our developers to concentrate on their biomedical research, not on which jagged edge of gcc is going to skewer them next.
Yup. You most certainly are.