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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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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...
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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
What is SGI's relationship to linux, and why doesn't this article mention linux once?
I'm posting this anonymously because I don't wanna get in trouble in case any of this is confidential. I don't think it is, but you never know.
SGI's official relationship to Linux is this: none whatsoever. At one time, there were some pretty serious plans to port core OS libraries, build abstraction layers and shims, and phase out the IRIX kernel in favor of Linux. It was thought to be easier to turn Linux into a real commercial-quality kernel (not my words; don't flame me!) than to port 60-odd million lines of IRIX to the then-proposed IA-64-based Origin 3000 variant. These plans have been informally shelved, meaning SN-IA is still a product on the roadmap, but nobody is working on it. It seems to have been put in the "maybe after McKinley" category.
(Take all of this as unofficial comment, of course, but this paragraph is total speculation on my part. I wonder if part of the reason IA-64 isn't really going anywhere in this market is because of the lack of a really good Fortran compiler for it. The MIPSpro Fortran 77 compiler, which I've worked with a lot, kicks ass, and I understand the F90 one does as well. Getting all of that tuned, optimized Fortran code to run on IA-64s seems to be a challenge for a lot of folks that are long-time die-hard SGI customers.)
SGI is officially committed to continuing to develop and ship systems based on the MIPS processors (R12000, R14000, and the upcoming R16K, and R20K) with the IRIX OS until further notice, which is to say that they're not opposed to exploring other options, but there just isn't any reason to switch that plan right now. The Origin 3000 server is a great piece of work, and the new lower-end Origin 300 is selling nicely, too. On the workstation side, believe it or not the humble little O2 is still selling briskly-- now with R7000 or R12000 processors, painted purple, and called O2+. Octane2 kicks ass, and a new workstation to be announced in January or February is also going to be based on MIPS/IRIX, combining Octane2 graphics with Origin 3000-style architecture.
So the official story is MIPS/IRIX forever.
Unofficially, SGI loves Linux. Check out oss.sgi.com sometime to see what SGI is doing with respect to Linux specifically (XFS, kdb, bigmem, NUMA, STP, etc) and Open Source in general (GLX, Inventor, Performer, etc).
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.
You know, that's the funny thing about SGI's graphics hardware. InfiniteReality graphics first came out in January, 1996. Since then, SGI has put the same graphics processors on a new system interface for the Onyx2, and tweaked some components in the system twice (called IR2 and IR3, even though the changes were very minor).
InfiniteReality--apart from having the coolest name of any graphics subsystem--has remained essentially unchanged since 1996. IR today has slightly faster geometry processors and much more TRAM than the original IR, but in every other way it is identical.
That's six year old technology, baby. And the rest of the world is just now starting to catch up.
Guess that's why SGI has been selling the same graphics hardware for all this time. Because they can.
Proprietary OS and software.
It's UNIX. Sure, it's a *flavor* of UNIX, but its genetic makeup is 99% indentical to every other flavor out there. Golly, even the "SGI GUI" is just a modified version of Motif plus HTML and vector icon libraries, all of which are well documented. Over the past 10 years I've ported code (graphical, non-graphical, and device drivers) to and from IRIX with very few problems. And heck, most of the problems had to deal with REACT, SGI's real-time kernel extensions... something that nobody else in the UNIX arena had at the time (they're just now catching up).
SGI hardware isn't cheap, but it's worth every penny to those that need it. The same goes for the support contracts (which are cheap if you consider the short response times and 24/7 electronic monitoring). And for the high-dollar customers, SGI Custom Engineering is actually a bargain if you compare their services to that of other companies. For almost any user, the SGI developer program (www.sgi.com) offers A LOT for the price (nothing, it's free)... compilers, 40% - 70% hardware discounts, support & training discounts, and gobs of co-marketing opportunities. Plus they listen. Aside from two less-than-satasfactory incidents, my group has had no trouble talking to real SGI engineers when their help was needed. SGI management and executives have also always been willing to lend an ear. Of course... listening and *doing* are two totally different things, but I think the company is finally pulling its head out of its rear.
Turns out there was demand.
Management killed it before it was produced. Customer nearly sued us. We wound up giving them 100 of the R10k based Indigo2 Impact systems for free in order to stop the legal action.
Hellofa way to make money.
As one engineer at SGI once said "We ship the worlds fastest broken hardware", and sometimes we sold hardware we decided later on not to productize.
Bali, Odyssey, and many other projects were victims of Forest Baskett and the rest of the SGI management "decision" making process, stick your head in the sand and wait for the decision to become irrelevant. Then you have made your decision.
My favorite failed projects were The Beast and Alien. Man, if Baskett hadn't killed those, we would have had some major league whup-ass CPUs, in 99 or 00 at latest. The Beast was a floating point and bandwidth monster. Hellaciously fast. Stuff coming out of HP/IBM/Compaq today isnt as fast as what The Beast was supposed to be. Alien was Beast on steriods. Those were monster-freaking-processors. They would have given an incredible advantage on the performance side.
Instead, SGI management put on the kneepads, and serviced Intel's current abortion, the IA64. Gee, lets scrap this kick-ass, compatible, freaking fast processor for this wet dream of a technology that has failed in the past (think Trace Multiflow).
Even today, with EV7 doing serious damage on the 64 bit front though not for long, and AMD doing damage on the 32 bit front, these guys are sticking with the 4th generation of R10k. From what I have seen, R14, R12, etc are all simply die shrinks and speed bumps to a 5 year old processor. They blew their last load on IA64, and from what I have heard, IA64 is now dead in the engineering groups. All that is left are die shrinks and speed bumps.
A shame, because the Origin architecture is one of the best out there. Crappy CPU, but great underlying architecture. This is why SGI is semi-relevant today. Not for long though.
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 simulator project I worked on in '98-'99 used a 32-processor Onyx2 with eight pipes (4 RMs each) to drive seven out-the-window channels at 3200x3400@60 plus a heads-up display.
Not a type: 3,200 pixels across, 3,400 pixels down, 60 frames per second. Times seven channels.
I've been doing this for a while, and it made me stop and say, "Holy crap."
>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
Dependent texture reads are the only really new thing in the last year or two (and only really got worked out right in the Radeon 8500), but next year is going to see floating point pixel formats, which was going to be one of Bali's truly important points. We should also see highly scalable boards built on consumer chips, which has been promised for years, but (with the exception of some 3dfx high end systems) not delivered properly.
John Carmack
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"