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.

Comments

I just don't see a way for them to do it..

[jcr]

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

SGI and marketing, wow factor

[green pizza]

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.