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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...
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
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.
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
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?
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)?
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.
Its due to their great songs!
;-)
I have an original, still-in-the-jewel-case "Octane: The Sound Track" CD. These five classic songs make a great addition to any collection.
1. Ignite Your Mind
2. I Have a Dream
3. OCTANE Swing (featuring the can't-get-it-out-of-your-head lines, "Octane / you're gonna rock-tane!" and "Competition is in shock-tane!" and "Octane, danke shoen!")
4. Retro OCTANE
5. Knee Deep in 3D
I wouldn't part with this disc for all the tea in China, but I'll encode it and send you the files for the right price.
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."
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.
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
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.
While i cant agree more about MIPS/IRIX being their best idea to date ... i gotta say, the wintel boxes they made are/were the best i'd ever used. we had a visual workstation 230 and a 320 in the office, both running NT, and they totally ran circles around any other windows machine in the building (comapqs and HPs mostly)
.. NT was their worst idea to date .. but boy they did it right.
:)
so yeah
oh yeah -- did i mention they came with DETAILED instructions on how to setup a dual boot? probably my fFavorite part
Given how the company is doing... I would say they can't. They just didn't know they couldn't...
nah. they just didnt know they couldnt sell wintel.
in fFact.. get this: the visual workstation 320 came out fFirst, a couple years ago. solid kick ass machine. hardwired kick ass graphics card, the whole nine yards. one problem tho: if you wanted a different graphics card, you basically couldnt, or it was a lot of work. and the add-ons and stunning graphics made it fFairly expensive, and hard to sell. so -- and this is the fFunny part -- they downgraded the next year's models, put in slower dumber cards, and actually dropped the system's version number to 230 indicating it's a lesser machine.
thats right.. their intended equipment was actually TOO GOOD. not many companies can seriously claim this.
even if the wintel strategy was a bad move, by golly they did it up right
I think the comma is left-out rather than misplaced since the comma after Linux is fine (I think). Add a comma after 'Unix operating system' and you get that they are focusing on Irix and Linux...rather than having Irix being a version of Linux !!
They have moved from NT but the problem for SGI is that they have also lost time and money with their misguided attempts at doing "other things." Hopefully, the new demand (and money) from government will give them an extra lease on life that can be properly used to build a solid profitable company.
Since the stock is so cheap, it would be nice for some heavy hitters to buy them and make it a private company and some time in the future, if ever, they can take the company public.
SGI needs to do a lot more R&D to ensure that it doesn't lose to others with deep pockets and they also need a clear strategy to determine the proper future of Irix vis a vis Linux.
Being private will take a lot of pressure off their shoulders and allow them to focus on building something sustainable. I wouldn't be surprised if their best bet is to become a smaller research focused software company and letting hardware be handled by others.
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
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.
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.
Reminds me of the "Indizone" 3D games contests SGI had years ago (from 1993 to 1995, I belive... in conjunction with Indy and Indigo2 marketing).
Cool that they're actually recognizing hobbyists and the fun that once accompanied SGI and its products.
Maybe there's still a chance the fun can return...
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>>>>>>>>>
Yea, isn't it ironic that SGI now uses NVIDIA hardware in their low-end workstations?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
I was at SGI during the Belluzzo years. I have to agree with this comment. How this man escaped criminal proceedings against him is beyond me....
:-).
The best comment I read on the SGI mailing lists when Belluzzo went to Microsoft (at about the same time that Start Wars, Episode one was released) was "so now it is revealed, there are always two, a master *and* an apprentice...".
:-)
Great place to work though - GO SGI !!!!!
Jeremy.
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"
what happened to the reality engine?
Reality Engine and Reality Engine 2 were predecessors to InfiniteReality. Around '96 there was a stripped down version of InfiniteReality, called, simply, Reality, that kind of took the place of RE2 in the product line, but that was only available in the Onyx2 deskside, so not too many were sold compared to IR systems.
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.
The name of the game is "Where's Waldo"
Exactly why you need a machine with gobs of bandwidth and the ability to sift through terabytes of textures as fast as your pentium can sift thru megabytes of text.
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.
Actually, according to SGI's own docs The VPro cards are just rebranded Quadros, which, in fact, *ARE* vanilla GeForce cards with some special features enabled in the hardware (like line-AA). All it takes is a change to one resistor to turn a "vanilla" GeForce into an SGI "VPro"
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
- 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.I am using one right now. They are *nice* boxes. They were built using the same design methodology as their current IRIX/MIPS boxes are. System level PROM, custom HAL for NT, nicely intergrated GFX, Audio, and Video I/O. All for $4000 or so if you bought the right configuration. Kind of like a next generation O2 that runs NT.
UMA design on the GFX allow insane amounts of texture with little performance loss. (500Mb texture is no problem on these little boxes.)
Maybe they were too good. I do know at the time you could not find another NT machine that offered the features at anywhere near the price of the 320.
Anyway, they were not canned because the market did not accept them. They were canned because they were litigated and dealt out of existance. From the legal issues surrounding the boot-loader partially owned by M$ and their M$ deal for GFX, they were locked into win32 only, or give up their plans for the line.
These machines were supposed to run Linux with full 3D support for an awesome chipset. Shown at Siggraph 99. This combined with the proposed library and system software ports would have made a very nice workstation. Linux would have benefited nicely from this a couple years ahead of schedule. It is well known that Microsoft does not want anyone selling windows to sell anything else particularly on machines that make the process easy, so...
Between that legal mess and some reluctance on the Open Source communities part to accept SGI work, owners of these machines are left with a very nice non-upgradable win2000 box. (Not that I ever want XP, but I DO WANT 3D LINUX dammit.)
Blogging because I can...
I have this one too. Cool stuff. Just how many other workstation manufacturers do this sort of thing. Might be part of the problem, but I think it shows some extra spunk that make the products great.
Blogging because I can...
SGI hasn't been able to hold a candle to high-end PC graphics boards for probably 3 years, and they [used to] cost ~10x as much. I know because we used to use SGIs exclusively at work, now we use Linux-based PCs.
What, exactly, do you do? If you have replaced your SGI systems with PCs, good for you, but that probably means the thing you're doing isn't terribly difficult.
Give me a nine-channel system, each channel 4000x3000 RGBA double-buffered. Oh, and I use shared memory arenas for my IPC, so it has to be a single system image. I'll need, let's see, two procs each for each channel (cull/draw), plus a proc for the router and a proc for the database pager. Plus a proc for the app, and one for the serial device handlers.
Shouldn't be a problem, right? PCs can do that. I just need a 22-processor Athlon motherboard with 9 Geforce 3 cards. 'Scuse me while I dash off to Fry's. Back in a flash.