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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."
It's a shame to see a company that had such interesting hardware and operating system going down. I used IRIX on an O2, and loved it. Was way ahead of its time.
But I have to ask, is there really any reason why to get an SGI today? I can see a company with an installed base of SGIs upgrading or what-not...but do they really offer anything new or different?
This is not a troll, it's an honest question. Back in the budding early days of the workstations sure, I could see getting these machines to work on 3D graphics etc etc. But now that 3D graphics cards are on regular PCs and Macs and both can run UNIX type operating systems, what does SGI or SUN for that matter have that you can't get elsewhere?
I'd be interested in knowing what others think about this or why they would keep going to SGI.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
They are both assets. If you think drivers are so easy to write, why don't you try writing one? Here's a hint: the main difference between a professional card that sells for $2000 and a gaming card with the same chipset (which sells for $200) is the drivers.
NVIDIA has a very good and very fast OpenGL implementation, not to mention lots of optimizations and tricks. The driver is as much of an asset as the hardware; it's certainly just as important for performance. If you've ever used ATI's version of OpenGL (which is half-assed at best), you'll realize how much of an asset the driver really is.
Completely untrue. I was at SGI at the time. The grpahics workstation business wasn't great, but not collapsed.
The original poster was completely correct, the Microsoft deal burned $300 million of much needed cash.
The Farenheight debacle was another aspect of it. *DONT* deal with Microsoft. Just don't. Ever. No matter how attractive it looks on the surface.
But greed keeps people thinking "but it'll be different for *me*. They won't screw over *me*. I'm different....). Wait until Microsoft pulls the plug on the Microsoft/NetApp agreements for more of the same.
Jeremy.