Slashdot Mirror
SGI Faces Bankruptcy
Richard Finney writes "
The stock chart tells the story: One time Silicon Valley high-flyer and contender for the Unix crown, SGI stock price dropped 20% on Friday ... deep into penny stock territory ... after releasing fiscal fourth quarter results. The Mountain View, California maker of high end computers is '
exploring financing alternatives with its lender and other sources.' With mounting losses and investors giving ol' Silicon Graphics the thumbs down, things aren't looking good."
How can you say that after all SGI have done for Linux, and open standards in general?
SGI:
- Gave Linux XFS, arguably its fastest and most robust filesystem to date. Far, far more robust than reiser, and quicker than anything else except reiser4 (and then only sometimes), except on deletes where it is slow by design - SGI realised earlier than most that if you need a simple rule, it's pretty safe to assume that people just don't delete files often (excluding short-lived temporary files, which XFS handles _incredibly_ efficiently.) Just check out the low rate at which XFS volumes become fragmented to see how you can take advantage of putting a little thought into deleting files.
- Scaled Linux beyond 32 CPUs for the first time ever. And years later they still hold the record: 1,024 CPUs in the one computer with a single memory space. Nobody else comes close, and I do mean nobody. And this isn't just SGI lab stuff any more - NASA bought 20 of these computers to build the fastest computer on the planet that uses commercial microprocessors.
- Invented OpenGL (hint: what do you think the "Open" in "OpenGL" refers to? bonus marks: compare and contrast OpenGL and DirectX) together with the surrounding (open) glue like GLX. This is pretty much the only reason Linux boxes and Macs have decent 3D, and the only reason you can actually have a decent game of quake even if you're using a dumb terminal. Try playing Quake when connected to a Citrix box. Fun? Didn't think so.
- a bunch of other things I don't know about personally, but here you go anyway.
Anyway, since SGI's main role these days is selling IA64-based supercomputers and workstations, I hope Intel just buy SGI but let them continue to run independently so they can just keep on with all their good work. They provide a useful service to the Linux community, even if you never pay them a cent - this probably has something to do with their current share price (sadly). You might not use OpenGL, Itanium, massive shared memory systems or XFS but the odds are good that at least one of these is helping you, or at least some bugs SGI fixed while getting one of these working.
IRIX *was* way ahead of its time, back in 1995. It had some security issues, but they were eventually fixed too. But that's it folks, aside from new hardware support, IRIX has hasn't had many updates since it recieved the IndigoMagicDesktop and 64-bit support about 10 years ago.
SGI's MIPS hardware went on a similar path. The fastest SGI MIPS CPUs available today are 800 MHz and 1 GHz (and maybe 900 MHz?) these are called R16K but are based on the oldschool R12K design. Still very impressive in terms of performance per MHz and performance per watt, but they are far away from UltraSPARC III, Power5, and even PowerPC and Intel Pentium. The same can be said for SGI's graphics hardware, they lost their competitive advantage over the past ten years to the point where they just started using a bunch of ATI FireGL GPUs instead.
What's their future? Itanium2 and SuSE???
SGI has treated its largest customers well over the years, but those who buy less than $5 million of SGI gear a year have basiclly gotten the finger. Those who buy less than $100 thousand a year aren't even recognized.
Sure, SGI still has some good technology, like OpenGL Performer (which is perfect for multi-GPU simulators and can run on Windows and Linux, thankfully!!) but for the most part, the company is a has-been.
So SGI is about to tank. Does this surprise anyone? I think the only surprise is that SGI has remained in business for the past 10 years.
Gave Linux XFS Scaled Linux beyond 32 CPUs In regards to OpenGL vs Direct 3D, I have heard that D3D has gotten way better since Carmack made those comments. HOWEVER, it's still just Microsoft that controls all of DirectX. But just look at the orgs and people that are on the OpenGL board, even their emails addresses are public: http://www.opengl.org/about/arb/overview.html http://www.opengl.org/about/arb/notes/meeting_note _2004-12-07.html
You're correct that IBM left the PC business (sold the Personal Systems Group to Lenovo last year) but IBM is still making -- and selling -- plenty of hardware. From page 22 of IBM's 2004 Annual Report,
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/annualreport/2004/2004($ in billions of US dollars)
Systems and Technology Group 2004: $17,916 2003: $16,469 Yr to yr change: 8.8% zSeries: 14.9% iSeries: (17.2)% pSeries: 7.3%
Almost $18 billion in hardware sales sounds pretty decent. A 14.9% increase in mainframe sales from the year before doesn't look "all but dead", and a 7.3% increase in pSeries (AIX/Linux) machines is more than "a few unix boxes." Especially since Gartner reports IBM leading the worldwide Unix server market last year,
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/newsYou make some very good points in your post and I agree with most of them, but please understand that IBM hasn't completely left the hardware business. We (yes, I work there) are having too much fun kicking Sun and HP around. And by the way, we sold over $15b in software last year, so we're not just a consulting company.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Gave Linux XFS, arguably its fastest and most robust filesystem to date.
Sorry, you are wrong. XFS is robust ON SGI machines, and nothing else.
XFS uses a direct memory-to-disk scheme. This makes it fast, but not robust on common x86 machines. On these machines, the first thing to go out on a power failure is the memory and later the harddisks. So, on power failure garbage will be written to the disk. On SGI machines, they added little capacitors to the memory, so it will survive more than the harddisk (and write will be correct).
I learnt that on the FISL.
It's a reasonable question, all right, with an unexpected answer: I/O. This is the one area where IRIX still stands out among the other Unix flavors, and nobody outside the supercomputer world knows it, even though it holds true on all their hardware platforms. If you look under the hood, you'll see that the IRIX kernel's I/O layer can move bits at a higher percentage of available bus bandwidth than any of the others. The OS does an amazing job of getting out of the way of the hardware.
When I was working on HP-UX, we used them as our benchmark goal, and never met it.
If you're NASA, you probably find the Altix supercomputers pretty compelling. If you're an iBank, you probably find the 8-24 way dual core (48 cores in the big ones) Sun boxes pretty useful for processing all your data and trades.
Sun boxes are about the same cost as x86 boxes in the high end, and they have all the stuff you really need. 64-bit, lights out management (you can discover problems in the hardware even after it has crashed, because it contains a little computer on a chip designed just to report the statte of the hardware, power cycle it, etc....), lots of PCI cards, SSL accelerator cards, lots of ram slots, disk slots, raid cards, etc....
Your average 8 proc US-IV system (16 cores) from Sun costs about the same as an 8 proc (8 cores) Opteron system from HP, for similar configurations. It (supposedly) has much better support for things like SSL cards and massive multiprocessing/multithreading, especially under java.
Someone probably should buy SGI and Cray. There is a market for high end (top 500) supercomputers and other high end data processing systems.