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SGI Faces Bankruptcy

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the dire-straits dept.

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."

46 of 383 comments (clear)

  1. Shame by SirPrize · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Shame by tgd · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Thats pretty debatable. The O2's were overpriced and underpowered, and Irix was SUCH a pain to work with. SysV but things just didn't quite work the same as other SysV boxes.

      SGI had gone from making significant high end hardware to making an attempt at the "trendy" market that Apple did such a good job being successful in. During the dot-com hype in the late 90's, they were pushing case design and graphics demos as justification for overpaying for their hardware.

      They were already on the way down at that point. The decision shortly after the O2 systems were introduced to start selling vastly overpriced PC-compatible Intel hardware was the nail in that coffin. (Lets hope Apple weathers that decision better than SGI did! There's a LOT of parallels between the two, only Apple has had success where SGI had failure).

      I think the last real significant (from a market innovation standpoint) hardware SGI really was selling was the Indy line, but even those were form-over-function and were mostly useful because at the time they had a real stranglehold on high-end graphics production.

  2. Well.. by sbentmar · · Score: 4, Funny

    They could always sue Linux.

    1. Re:Well.. by Zeinfeld · · Score: 4, Interesting
      They could always sue Linux.

      Linux has always been a much bigger competative threat to UNIX vendors than to Mr Softy in Redmond.

      SGI had a ringside seat for the Web revolution, all the Netscape stuff was written on SGI. Sun trounced them because SGI made the mistake of concentrating on the 'high end' and abandoning the comodity computing area. Also all that Java mumbo jumbo somehow led people in the Internet world to think that everything had to run on Sun.

      DEC also disappeared, rmember the days when they were second only to IBM and growing faster? IBM is no longer in the PC business and its mainframe business is all but dead. They are now a consulting company that makes a few unix boxes.

      Clark predicted that SGI was on the road to ruin back in 1994 when he quit. They have been a shell for years. Pretty much all the former SGI offices off Shoreline and Charleston were taken over in the 90s.

      This is like the death of Cray or Symbolics, by the time the company finaly disappears its ten years later.

      --
      Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
      Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
    2. Re:Well.. by aktzin · · Score: 5, Informative
      IBM is no longer in the PC business and its mainframe business is all but dead. They are now a consulting company that makes a few unix boxes.

      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_ ibm_financials.pdf

      ($ 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/news/ pressreleases/2005/feb/gartner.html

      You 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.
  3. Make a deal with the devil... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And you lose. I'm pretty sure that SGI's downward spiral can be directly attributed to their little tangle with the Beast of Redmond.

    The zombie corpse of SGI, stripped of its important 3D computing patents which went mostly to NVIDIA and Microsoft, has been shambling around for a while now, but it will take a miracle for it to pull back from the edge.

    1. Re:Make a deal with the devil... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Make a deal with the devil... by BRSloth · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Make a deal with the devil... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yep. They're just one more Microsoft partner turned victim.

      More recently, SGI has been working with Linux, which means that Microsoft really wants SGI dead.

      And that means that you can't trust the price of SGI's stock to provide an honest picture of what's happening in SGI. Even if SGI does the necessary financial restructuring, and improves their financial outlook, their stock will remain low, because that's where Microsoft wants it to stay. When you have enough money to burn, and you don't care about the law, it's easy to manipulate the stock price of a smaller company. Microsoft did the same thing to Corel when they were trying to arrange some bridge financing, and their Linux business was starting to grow.

      The good news is that it may not be as bad as the Slashdot article says. Unlike the intro blurb, the linked article does not mention bankruptcy. Instead, it shows a 10 percent loss on $170 million revenue. That's in the "fixable" range.

      Over the next while, I expect to see a lot of FUD aimed at SGI, in order to discourage investors from providing SGI with any financial assistance. That's another thing that Microsoft did to Corel.

      Unlike Corel, I think SGI has a fairly good chance of getting past this. Corel's business was mostly based on Windows, via WordPerfect and Corel Draw. Corel's business was therefore very vulnerable to various Microsoft tactics, and it's no surprise that business had been shrinking for years.

      SGI, on the other hand, does not have the same sort of ongoing problems. Instead, SGI's problems stem from their past, and much of that was arranged by Microsoft. You may recall former SGI CEO Rick Belluzzo, who was instrumental in changing SGI's business from their own brand of high-end computer hardware, to a strategy based on Windows NT:

      > Belluzzo gave customers another reason to stick around: The Visual Workstation, a Windows NT machine that carries SGI's trademark slick design and dazzling graphics--but not its premium pricing. Instead, he's plunging SGI smack into the rough-and-tumble business of making high-volume workstations based on Intel and Microsoft standards.

      That was the same Rick Belluzzo who made similar moves while working as Executive Vice-President at Hewlett-Packard, with similar negative results for that company. Belluzzo later got a job as COO at Microsoft, which many viewed as a reward for his work at SGI and HP.

      Anyway, the point is that those problems for SGI are in the past. SGI's current business is based on their strengths, in the areas of high-end computing, and computer graphics (e.g. for Hollywood), which includes consulting, and work on Linux. While, as history has shown, Microsoft can still do things to try to cut off SGI's air supply, at least SGI's business is not tied to Windows, which makes them less vulnerable than Corel.

    4. Re:Make a deal with the devil... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What the fuck are you talking about? Since it's impossible for any filesystem to be perfectly reliable in the face of arbitrary hardware failures, filesystems don't need to take hardware into consideration in order to be robust. You can simply desire that:

      1) if the hardware is running smoothly, the filesystem never fails
      2) if the hardware screws up in any way imaginable (aliens come and rape your hard disk while you're sleeping), the filesystem never fails to return to a perfectly working state (as if nothing had ever happened) and with a low amount of data loss.

      With XFS, you can tune the amount and nature of data loss in the case of hardware (power) failure. The default (which many people don't like) is to emit NULL for any region of a file that was known to have had writes that were not committed. This is arguably BETTER than filesystems that will simply give you the old contents of the file, even though the filesystem could have known that there was an uncommitted write. Of course, XFS can let you have that exact same behaviour, on a per-file basis.

      XFS also gives you advanced quota support and guaranteed-rate I/O, but most people don't need that.

      However, you shouldn't need to be a freaking guru to add the four letters "sync" to your /etc/fstab and mount any super-critical filesystems synchronous, so that power failures lose the least amount of data possible (and you take the accompanying performance hit.)

      In short, XFS' default configuration is top speed and high reliability only on high quality hardware setups (UPS or whatever), and this has surely bitten a lot of people who didn't bother to find this out/test things first/read the fine documentation.

      There is absolutely nothing about XFS that stops you from making it as reliable as any other filesystem, however. I don't see how a filesystem can not be "memory-to-disk". I guess you mean "buffered" (asynchronous) - you can turn that off dude.

    5. Re:Make a deal with the devil... by Jeremy+Allison+-+Sam · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:Make a deal with the devil... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Well I was there through the duration and both you AND the parent poster was correct.

      When SGI bought Cray BUT let SUN keep the E10000 it devastated SGI's high end business and did make SUN a fortune. SGI couldn't really of sold the E10000 since it was SPARC and Solaris based, but hindsight being 20/20 though should have axed it. Or better yet they shouldn't have touched Cray with a 10 foot pole in the first place. That merger was an unmitigated disaster like most everything McCracken and TJ did. Cray and SGI were going out to the same customer and backstabbing each other. Not good.

      Jim Clark had the vision at SGI. Towards the end of his days there he started walking around pointing out the PC was going to bury overprices workstations and SGI, and eventually he was run out by McCracken. It was bad he was walking around saying it, but he was totally right.

      SGI's workstations first missed with the Impact because of production problems on the texture memory(and it was way overpriced). They missed again with the O2. It was great for video and some texture tricks. They advertized this 1 GB memory bandwidth but neglected to tell anyone that the CPU couldn't get over 80 MB/sec to and from RAM. You want to evaluate a computer run the STREAM benchmark so you know the sustained bandwidth to memory. A Pentium Pro of the era could easily do 200 MB/sec. The end result was unless you were using the special hardware for special applications, or your app worked in data cache it was a complete and utter dog. I'm certain it helped insure ILM made so many bad movies during the years they had nothing but O2's. They were an anchor around the necks of artists, and anyone who saw them run Maya or Softimage side by side with a PC, wanted stick a dagger in to their O2.

      Octane's were nice enough machines, better memory system than the O2 but they were very over priced and the MIPS architecture simply couldn't keep up with IA32. SGI didn't have the money or the focus to compee with Intel especially after Intel outright stole all the secrets that made the DEC Alpha so fast.

      SGI was doomed in the workstation business, the day Intel stole the Alpha's secrets from DEC and they did outright steal them, and it led to Pentium Pro, etc. It caught the IA32 architecture up to RISC almost overnight. The second blow was Windows NT which was good enough to run workstation class apps like Softimate, Maya, Pro/E etc. The third blow was Microsoft buying Softimage and porting it to Windows NT and Pentium Pro which started the rush away from SGI.

  4. huh by user32.ExitWindowsEx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    maybe nvidia will buy them (thereby fixing up lingering IP issues) and be able to open-source their video drivers.

    --
    "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
  5. extremely unfortunate. by bagel2ooo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Unfortunately, when the hardware was new I was not able to afford it. Currently I own an Indigo, Indigo2, and an O2. They are very capable and suprisingly rounded machines. I was concerned with SGIs direction during their stint of windows clusters but with the linux superclusters they've been working on lately and some of the rekindled movement with the workstations, I have been very hopeful of a bit of an SGI revival. Hopefully, they will be able to recover from this. If not, I know that many people will be greatful for the contributions they have made.

    --
    ( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
  6. This is really too bad... by sgant · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:This is really too bad... by imsabbel · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The problem really is that even the large systems have rapidly losing ground.

      12 years or so ago, an onyx with an infinite reality II graphics pipeline was in another universe compared to anything else...
      Nowadays, there are so much less situations where systems of those kind can play out their advantages...

      I mean, we have now GAMING cards that can run 19xx *1400 in 32 bit, while pushing 10million+polygones pre frame...

      --
      HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
    2. Re:This is really too bad... by ebh · · Score: 5, Informative
      Is there really any reason why to get an SGI today?

      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.

    3. Re:This is really too bad... by iwadasn · · Score: 4, Informative


      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.

  7. Translation... by iamdrscience · · Score: 4, Funny
    The stock chart tells the story:
    See that's their problem, there's a mutiny going on at Silicon Graphics, the graphics are turning against them!
  8. This is very sad by Darth+Maul · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have an Indy. I used in in college for CS work, and it was perfect. Learned OpenGL stuff, etc. I was the biggest SGI fanboy. evar.

    I was actually at the event that started the complete destruction of SGI. It was summer 2000 in New Orleans. This would be SIGGRAPH 2000. I actually presented a paper, and was invited to the SGI party at Anne Rice's humble adobe. This was the day of a "big annoucement", and we were ALL expecting SGI PC graphics cards. Taking the SGI name and technology into the new up-and-coming PC graphics card market was the brilliant move we all expected. Compete with nVidia, and take names.

    What did they announce? Some newer, bigger supercomputer thingy. You could taste the silence in the room.

    That was the day, certainly in my book, that sealed the fate of SGI. After that, PC graphics cards just exploded onto the scene, and the whole reason for getting an SGI became moot.

    I still love Irix, and can't believe how amazing the Indy is that I bought back in 1994. Still is a great machine, and it's a shame to see SGI finally near the end.

    --
    --- witty signature
    1. Re:This is very sad by speleo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I had an SGI PC graphics card back in '91 or '92.

      It was a big ISA card that took up two full length slots.

      At the time I worked in QA for a large software company that did graphics software for the PC (and UNIX ports, too) and SGI loaned us a few of these things to beta.

      They worked well but the drivers were somewhat buggy. I don't recall what happened but I figure the market for PC graphic cards that cost more than the PC wasn't destined to be a big seller back in those days.

  9. Does this.... by shreevatsa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Mean anything for the STL? I mean, is SGI still working on the STL, and will it continue to keep its excellent documentation publicly (freely) available, etc?

  10. They should have got into the graphics card market by delire · · Score: 3, Interesting



    I said this years ago when working for a VR centre using SGI systems and saw the centre migrate more and more of their workstations to cost and performance effective NT systems.

    NVIDIA were becoming a big player, yet SGI was responsible for the extremely popular 3D library we were using.

    Their arrogance was partly to blame, they never did confess that the gaming industry would come to define the "3D graphics workstation" and that VR was fast becoming a ghost train. Instead they sent girls around in push-up bras selling upgrade licenses.

  11. Re:How Linux Killed An Industry by Nutria · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I still can't figure out why anybody would buy a Sun box?

    Because some people need big SMP systems with operating systems that have the features that big organizations need.

    Linux-on-Opteron plus the OSS tool makers are getting there, but not yet.

    --
    "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
  12. Re:Another notch... by buckhead_buddy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you're thinking about companies that'll buy up SGI rather than just kill them off, don't forget that other Jobs' company with a focus on software rendering products. They've been known to also be big consumers of SGI stuff when they're putting together a new demo reel every couple of years.

  13. Thats not trolling at all. by tgd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Its a question they should've asked themselves six years ago.

    Sun has the advantage of being the "standard" for enterprise Unix applications. They're hurting but thats sigificant.

    SGI (aside from the Cray stuff) hasn't offered anything over other systems in half a decade.

    I used to work for a SGI VAR, and even seven years ago, most of the customers with existing installations were already looking and moving off them. The issue was people generally hated Irix, and as non-Irix hardware got better, the pain of changing platforms was mitigated by the pleasure of getting away from Irix. I commented in the parallel with Apple in another reply. SGI made the switch to Intel (or attempted it, I have no idea these days if that stuck or not) but unlike Apple, they had nothing to offer when they moved off MIPS. People didn't like their OS anyway.

  14. Re:They should have got into the graphics card mar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    Instead they sent girls around in push-up bras selling upgrade licenses.

    Torrent please.

  15. Let us mourn... by AnObfuscator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... the loss of yet *another* innovative & powerful system architecture ... yet another victim of the cheap-ass & now all-conquoring x86.

    PowerPC in Apple, SPARC in Sun, and now MIPS in SGI... one wonders how long PowerPC/POWER will last in IBM's workstations & servers...

    I love commodity hardware from a social perspective -- cheap, standardized, capable hardware means access to vast quantities of information is becoming practically free for a rapidly increasing percentage of the world's population. On the other hand, I can't help but feel a substantial pang of loss as these non-standard platforms are, despite innovative and arguably superior design, destroyed only by the economy of scale. Alas.

    RIP, SGI. You were damn cool while you lasted.

    --
    multifariam.net -- yet another nerd blog
    1. Re:Let us mourn... by Nutria · · Score: 3, Insightful

      PowerPC in Apple, SPARC in Sun, and now MIPS in SGI...

      Don't forget the DEC Alpha. Fastest CPU all thru the 90s.

      --
      "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
  16. Nerd Typo by iamdrscience · · Score: 4, Funny
    after releasing fiscal forth quarter
    They're still using Forth? No wonder they're going out of business! Keep up with the times, SGI!
  17. The days of high -end hardware are over by pongo000 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Back in the mid 90's, I wrote software for a commercial satellite imaging system (now part of Space Imagining). SGIs were the workstation of choice: Very high-end, graphics without compare, in-depth support for parallel processing, and relatively fast. Cheap they were not (not to mention a fairly buggy C++ compiler in IRIX that took up many hours of our time...usually very esoteric bugs that even stumped the SGI folks).

    Back then, the rumor was always floating around that SGI was considering moving from Irix to Linux. (Did I hear correctly that they finally did, years later?) Amongst ourselves, we would talk about there was no way Linux would be able to replace Irix (remember, this was '96!), and that it would be a mistake for SGI to go this route.

    How wrong we were...SGI, like Cray and some of the others mentioned, refused to give up their hold on proprietary high-end hardware, and have fallen hard. Now that the hardware market has become commoditized, with throw-away PCs, there's really no need for companies like SGI, Sun, etc. Sun, to their credit, has tried to bail from their sinking ship by making overtures to the OSS crowd and by delving into software, but they may have been too late to start manning the lifeboats. But it's my belief that Sun's days are numbered as well.

    So a hearty farewell to SGI. I just hope they go down swiftly and silently.

  18. Ah, they used the wrong language! by PornMaster · · Score: 3, Funny

    after releasing fiscal forth quarter results

    Forth???

    Everyone knows that you need to release your results in Java or C# these days... *sigh*

    --
    500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
  19. tragic but not surprising by william_w_bush · · Score: 4, Insightful

    owned an indigo2 for a while, nice r10000 mips. nice having a 64-bit cpu and operating system back in 1999. well designed too.

    the problem with sgi is that it's been living in the year 1995 since 1990, which was working well for it for a while, but when commodity gear just starts killing your performance and cost there comes a point where you have to move on to a new platform. this is like sun, except sun seems a little farther along and willing to keep pushing forward, while sgi just keep digging bigger and bigger holes for themselves.

    sad, but the dot-com boom which fed these companies also birthed the commodity pc boom which killed them. i actually want to lump apple in that same catagory, but unlike the rest which stayed in their path and carved themselves farther and farther from the mainstream, apple kept pushing to keep their market position, and in pc's managed to keep their niche. surprising, but their success in the last few years had very little to do with their core pc business, and everything to do with i*'s keeping their brand warm.

    just hope these same market forces end up killing the ms monopoly they created, an good open sourced os (not necc. linux) would make a lot of the hardware innovation that stopped post-lintel possible again.

    --
    The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
  20. last time we had financial problems on slashdot... by skogs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    the financial problems were from TiVo. Everybody thought that it was stupid, and their leadership had just left. Everybody mocked me, as I shoved otherwise unused 15,000 from my portfolio into them. I would like to say that right now, if I pulled it right now, I would gain significantly from it. I'm going to wait some more time. With SGI I'm not sure. Their market seems weak to me. They still make superb and beautiful hardware, but I am afriad it is nothing that in a corporate environment I couldn't duplicate. Not identically at any rate, but I could certainly grid the corporate work environment and achieve at least competative results...and I could do it cheaper. The major university number crunching has also been well proven to be able to be run on our 'limited' hardware we store under our desks. Now, don't flame me because I think this AMD and INTEL hardware under our desks is good. Far from it, SGI's hardware whips the poo out of them. But its kind of like this: Never get involved in a land war in asia.

    --
    Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
  21. Re:A surprise? by DeadBeef · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oh I agree that cycles per second is not a useful measurement of performance. The point of my post was that even if your application performs two or three times better per clock on a given architecture you are going to get beaten if you competition does four mhz for every mhz you do at a fraction of the price.

    And anyway I have a lower slashdot ID, so I win.

    --
    I am a lawyer and this constitutes legal advice and I shall indemnify you against any losses arising from taking it.
  22. Time to buy stock by Felinoid · · Score: 3, Funny

    My mother got into the stock market buying up Commodore stock just before it went into obilvion.

    Now it's time for me to buy SGI stock. Just like my mother did.

    --
    I don't actually exist.
  23. Recipe for Failure by DynaSoar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1. Make something that is X better than everything else.

    2. Count on the fact that people will pay Y times the common average going rate for "the best".

    3. Charge X*Y+Z where Z is an arbitrary high number chosen by management who are paying more attention to the stock prices than the computer science.

    4. Neglect the fact that while many people will makes googly noises about "the best", they will go for "good enough" in proportion to the constant Z, and that this effect will increase over time.

    --
    "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
  24. IRIX was left for dead, erm, SGI was left for dead by minnkota · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  25. SGI and Open Source / Open Standards by minnkota · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  26. Re:Speaking of Huh? by alienw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  27. OpenGL? by rexguo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    SGI is the inventor and care taker of OpenGL. Without OpenGL, desktop 3D graphics would be completely monopolised by Microsoft's Direct3D. If SGI goes down, what's going to happen to OpenGL and the OpenGL Architecture Review Board that's responsible for advancing OpenGL?

    --
    www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
    1. Re:OpenGL? by bamb8s · · Score: 3, Informative
      SGI is the inventor and care taker of OpenGL. Without OpenGL, desktop 3D graphics would be completely monopolised by Microsoft's Direct3D. If SGI goes down, what's going to happen to OpenGL and the OpenGL Architecture Review Board that's responsible for advancing OpenGL?
      SGI already sold patents that cover some aspects of OpenGL to MS. It's been mentioned here previously in the MS Buys (Some) SGI Patents article. You have permission to be afraid, very afraid. ;-)
  28. ditto... 3dfx/nv/vl/3dlabs et al... by burnttoy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I worked at Videologic when 3dfx were in their ascendency (comprising a lot of SGI engineers). We were producing some fine graphics chips (yup, the dreamcast STILL looks damn good to me ;-) and so were they, nVidia were giving us the TNT and TNT2 and _STILL_ SGI were trying to charge mega-bucks for performance that could be got straight from the shelf at a fraction of the price & AGP was just around the corner. 3DLabs (worked there too!) whose chips _are_ very good at geometry - a corner stone of 3D rendering - started making serious efforts on windows drivers... and the game was over for SGI

    Yup, they should've done graphics cards. At one time they had all the knowledge they needed but i guess someone high up the company didn't like the competition or cut throat margins so decided not to. A lot of engineers jumped ship to nVidia or 3dfx, I guess they realised the money was goning to be elsewhere.

    3D software ended up running OGL or DX under Windows using cheap 3D hardware. Since then few have considered SGI.

    So... who killed SGI? Lack of "vision" really causing engineers to jump ship when they soppted opportunities elsewhere. Let's not forget that althhough 3dfx are gone and the .com boom is over a lot of people still made a lot of money in share option trading at that time.

    --
    Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
  29. Re:Apple should buy them out by suitepotato · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Their engineers and their software libraries alone should be worth quite a tidy sum and at least Apple would put the stuff to use in some or other product (some high end 3D package that does for 3D what FCP did for video). Microsoft would almost certainly mess it up if they bought them up.

    That said, the fact that buyers are not exactly beating down SGI's door speaks volumes in itself.

    Hey, those with mod, points... mod parent up, please. The poster makes a good point. Bear with me here, I'm going to address the second line first and proceed to the first.

    For years, SGI was seen as the platform for CGI but SGI was indeed one of the biggest bunch of arrogant bastards I ever got within ten feet of. I requested some information and nothing more and they ignored three requests and on the fourth called me and asked to meet with me at a local sales office. I asked to be sent their printed marketing material first before I would meet with them and they point blank refused and insisted on speaking with me in person at which point they'd hand me the literature.

    So I reluctantly agreed. I was looking to start a small CGI business for local broadcasters and video producers and what was on the PC platform was just not fast enough for the time frames that prospective clients were asking for. Of course, what the fark would they know, but I digress.

    I got there and they gave me the full court press. I told them at the outset that the package would have to be solid and self-consistant and problem free. I could teach myself anything they had, that wasn't the issue. Price and performance was. If it was right I might be able to swing $100K in financing toward it with the backing of some interested people. But I had to show them that it could be done in one shot.

    The SGI sales people basically ignored everything I said, kept pressing me on their most expensive machines, and kept encouraging me to blow off my would-be partners and find someone willing to go in on a deal of at least $1.5M. I wasn't planning on any such level, made it clear, they ignored me, gave the full court press, continued on.

    I ended up walking out as gracefully as I could, after it became clear they had no intention of settling for $90K worth of sales (I needed to hold back 10% for support equipments), and handed me literature that was by their own admission one year out of date and they promised the up-to-date literature would be sent anon. It never was.

    The result was no sale, the potential business never got off the ground, everyone went their different ways, and that was that. Here's where I address the first part. I tried to salvage something of my time by going with off-the-shelf PC hardware and software.

    There was maybe one Macintosh app of the time that could do anything useful and IIRC it was Electric Image. At the time, they wanted some ungodly amount of money that was a good 25%-50% above comparable Windows NT based offerings such as Lightwave and even SoftImage. The DEC Alphas of the time were faster than the Macs and they had SMP Alpha boxes availible which could really do some serious work (at that time). The Windows platform was the one to go with, but it couldn't touch SGI of course.

    Fast forward to today when Apple is selling SMP boxes every day, they have a really well put together BSD-ish/*nix-ish OS, paid supported software support, and are comparable to the Wintel side. The Wintel side can already do 64-bit, and there are boards which will take four dual-core 64-bit AMD chips. Makes the SGI base of yesteryear look like a calculator. With Apple going to Intel for their boards, a quad SMP dual-core board from Apple could be a reality fairly quickly.

    Apple was always the darling of the DTP mavens even when it lagged in power compared to Wintel and less expensive Wintel apps had more and better features than Photoshop. They nearly squandered that religious fervor altogether and if the OSX platform had been delayed any longer,

    --
    If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
  30. Re:Altix? by Verity_Crux · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've been working with Altix boxes for the past six months. They rock. The Numalink stuff works really well. I particularly like their FPGA boxes. The only competition for them in that arena is Cray, strangely enough. Nobody else can stream data into FPGAs at 6.5Gb/s straight out of the box. Nallatech, Starbridge, and the others are just wannabes in that arena. If SGI can get their FPGA boxes into the mainstream market they may have a chance for the Altix line to save them (or at least the engineers working on those ;-).

  31. Well, SunRay by mcc · · Score: 4, Insightful
    SunRay is actually a truly fantastic product if you can get an opportunity to use it. There is something just absolutely fantastic about being able to pull your little card out of the machine in front of you, walk to an entirely other part of the building to where someone you know is sitting, say "I'm having trouble with this, could you take a look at it?", stick your card into the machine sitting next to him, and have whatever you were doing just pop up there. Those little cards change the entire PC computing dynamic, and the new dynamic makes way more sense pretty much anywhere except in the home.

    Unfortunately Sun
    • Charges about as much as a low-end PC for the SunRay thin client
    • Charges about as much as a mid-range business PC for the SunRay thin client if you want little frills like, y'know, a monitor.
    • More or less requires the use of Solaris to use Sunray, which makes quite a bit of sense when you consider SunRay necessarily requires a hugeass multiproc server stowed somewhere, but which, seriously, is not something many people would want to use as a desktop OS. You could maybe sell the end user on Linux, if you set it up quite specifically. Solaris, um, that's a lot harder. The upshot of this is that SunRay probably only appeals to that small number of companies where everyone is or can expected to be a UNIX user.
    So between these things, the only places I've aware of in the entire world using SunRay in a way that demonstrates its potential are large universities with big Sun contracts, and, um, Sun itself. If there's another business using this system I don't know what it is.

    I think this is kind of representative of Sun as a whole right now. They've got a WHOLE bunch of promising ideas and services and products. But they're not quite where they can be useful in a real world situation-- there's just those two or three simple-but-difficult-to-solve issues that hold it back from people buying it. In every case Sun could probably address these issues if they thought really hard about exactly who they wanted to buy this and why-- that is, they've got the neat tech but they don't have a clear picture of exactly what (not "it could be used in a multimedia telecommunications infrastructure!", an actual exact product) this tech should be used for in the real world.

    In the meantime, the energy that could be used on figuring out how to leverage or market the things that Sun offers but no one else does (SunRay-ish stuff) is all being diverted into fighting uphill battles, mostly trying to keep a market presence for Sun's not-so-unique products-- for example, the Solaris vs. Linux fight-- which are still the cornerstone of Sun's business, but aren't necessarily the company's strength anymore now that similar or interchangeable products have become more commonplace.

    I'm sure they're trying to figure this out also, and I'm sure there's some way Sun can change this situation, but I don't know when or if it will happen.
    --
    Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts