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Silicon Graphics To Be Delisted From NYSE
Dan Linder writes "Starting Monday, November 7th, Silicon Graphics will be delisted from the NYSE. The future of the graphics and supercomputing former-heavyweight has never been less certain. This is especially unfortunate given their ongoing commitment to Linux and other open-source projects." From the article: "The company's stock, which once traded at $50 per share, fell below NYSE's minimum standard for continued listing earlier this year. The move comes as little surprise. The company received a warning from the NYSE in May, when its share price dropped below the $1 barrier. Although it had dipped into sub-$1 territory in late 2001 and again in late 2002, the price on both occasions recovered within a month or two. "
Reverse splits are not done on the NYSE, only on NASDAQ and maybe some other markets outside the US. This goes back to the great crash in 1929, when everyone was doing this, and it caused a lot of confusion about what the stock was worth. Antiquated rule though.
The NYSE charges a fee for reverse splits, but it can be done. The problem with reverse splits to avoid delisting is it's a very temporary measure, as stock prices will often fall even faster after a split. Many companies have tried reverse splits to prop up stock price only to be delisted anyway because the price quickly fell below $1 again.
Once they have delisted, yes it will become harder to raise more capital. The bigger issue I think though is that the analysts do not look fondly on a stock that drops off of an exchange. The investing public's opinion will fall drastically and, as a result, the confidence in them will be basically gone. The ability to raise any form of capital (through equity or debt) will be very restricted and there is a likelihood that other companies with receivables out with them will come knocking for their money.
That work will still be done (perhaps not by the same people though) - the vanilla kernel goes to 128 already. 512 is not too far off.
AMD's next generation CPUs will essentially be a bunch of Opterons with a new generation of hypertransport to interconnect them. This will give commodity clusters machines with 16 or 32 CPUs, then scalability work will accelerate in the OSes.
512 is impressive, but not too difficult to attain given the right resources.
LL
Nope. You can't be under $1.00/share on NASDAQ for more than a month without being delisted.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Dupe.5 8&tid=167
I knew I had read this news. It is from http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/02/21472
They made the world a better place though, IMHO.
They made the OSS world a better place, at least. SGI is putting lots of resources in OSS software. They gave us things like XFS. Their engineers are part of the group of programmers who made (and are still making right now with patches being merged in each release) possible to make linux scalable in big SMP boxes (ie: their 512-CPU boxes). They gave us things like GLX (the opengl xservers glue)
Linux users owe SGI a lot. They're still not dead though, I hope they find a way to make SGI profitable again...
I have followed SGI's stock and conference calls very closely since 2001.. I have also Extensively used their product since 1993. I've made a lot of money trading the pops in the stock but those days seem over and the risk is too high.
They've had the Same CEO for 7 years. He is also the Chairman of the board. That makes it difficult for the board to remove him. The board should be sued. The executives should be sued. It is sad to watch those assclowns run the company into the ground. Their is no sense of urgency and there never has been.
No executives have been fired. Heads are rolling at Dell because of a single bad quarter. It is like that at most successful companies.. but not SGI..
On October 25, they had their quarterly CON call.. The CEO didn't even mention the impending delisting.. I figure he had to know that it would be announced to the public by the NYSE within days.
The story of SGI is that the best tech doesn't always win (though it is a bit hard to say that with Itanic in the picture).
I got the information from the following Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/2002/10/18/1018lucent_print. html, which states in part:
To get to $20, Lucent would have to enact a 1-for-29 split, based on recent prices and its number of shares outstanding. According to the NYSE, a company must pay $5,300 for a reverse stock split.
I can't find any information that says reverse splits are illegal on the NYSE. Do you have a link?
AT&T (symbol T) is listed on the NYSE. It did a reverse split (1 for 5) on 19-Nov-02.
I know General Electric, AT&T Bell Labs, and HP all chipped in but SGI did too. I didn't mean to suggest they invented it though.
They also have extensions for singly linked lists and hashes which will - in some form - make it into C++-0X. Boost deserves a lot of credit for that as well.
There is a lot of SGI template code donated to GCC also.
Alexander Stepanov went onto SGI after HP and continued his work with implementing and extending the STL while there. It improved many implementation details (the HP version was not thread safe for example), as well as adding several templates (hash'es etc) that did not get into the standard for political reasons. Like the HP version, the SGI code was freely available (BSD-like license).
The SGI implementation of STL has pretty much become the defacto-standard implementation. It is definately the most widely used implementation in the open source world and probably in the proprietary world as well.
On a related note, this is a pretty interesting interview with Stepanov.
Errrrrmmmm... I was under impression iD games used still OpenGL rather than Direct3D.
The Windows versions probably do use DirectX, but remember that DirectX is a lot more than just Direct3D - DX is probably used for keyboard and mouse support.
I don't have Q4 yet, but my package of Doom 3 has absolutely no mention of OpenGL even when it definitely uses OpenGL extensively - and the iD software's Linux page definitely says that Q4 needs working OpenGL!
You missed one of the biggest factors, many mutual funds and institutions (e.g., retirement/pension investors) generally have rules which prohibit them from investing in OTC stocks with low market cap (share price * shares). This is why a reverse split doesn't help, it may increase the share price, but of course reduce the number of shares.
Mutual funds and institutional investors are highly desired as they tend to be stable stock holders which can reduce the volatility of a stock (once they decide to invest they hold large chunks of companies and hold them for a while to increase tax efficiency). Once you get into the open market, you get hedge funds, insiders, and day-traders manipulating your stock price which can cause other investors to flee for the woods.
They also haven't had any analysts covering them since the beginning of this year (nobody likes to cover OTC or penny stocks).
Moving to an OTC (over the counter) market means that there are only a couple brokers making a market in the stock and price reporting is really up to them to perform on a timely basis. This means your broker (unless they are the ones making the market in the stock) really has to try to find a buyer for any stock to you want to sell or will have to pay the market maker a fee and/or be subject to the price they report. In a "listed" stock there generally are several big brokerages that match buyers with sellers and with a big exchange like NYSE enough shares are traded on the floor to create a more continuous range of prices and fast execution of any retail sized trader order. As the price continues to fall, the OTC market maker gives up and demote the stock to the "pink sheets" where sales are reported on paper reports as trades occur. Then the stock isn't very liquid at all and the daily or weekly price report is fairly worthless as an indicator of the worth of the stock.
The long and the short of it is that this means giving stock options to the employees or the executives is really not very meaningful anymore (anytime they sell, they don't have a good idea of the price they will get and more likely they will "heisenberg" the stock because if they sell the price is likely to go down) meaning it's hard to motivate employees and executives with either their existing or any new stock options or grants. Companies like SGI are all about employees, the assets are basically worthless to the investors w/o the employees. Unable to motivate them with stock/ownership, they have to pay them more (e.g. bonuses), or likely suffer attrition.
It's a downward death spiral that almost no company can get out of. For example, SGI has already had to pledge assets (e.g., patents, trademarks, etc.) to get their latest operating loan. In bankrupcy this puts these new lenders in a primary position and the normal equity/stock holders and current bond holders in an inferior position making it less likely for people to invest in the stock (equity holders are the last to get paid back in a bankrupcy). This is what makes it hard to raise any captial, except by heavily mortgaging thier assets even further to the lenders.
Once one of the lenders decides that the company assets are worth more than the company itself it often just rips the company apart for a fire sale to an army of lawyers who snap up patents at fire sales in order to shake down large companies for a few quick bucks. It's a sad, sad day when that happens.
In the 1990's, soon after their great success at Hollywood blockbusters, they ventured into the videogames business with Nintendo in the form of the Nintendo64 console. Unfortunately, a more modest machine won the hearts and minds of videogames enthusiasts all over: Sony Playstation.
Then, regular PCs, with very powerful and cheap 3D video cards began eat their Workstation lunch. Linux clusters of common pc hardware substituted their costly hardware in the making of Hollywood flicks.
Now, the end is near for the once king of rendering...
I don't feel like it...
The management story I was told was to offer up XFS on *every* platform, then sell this CXFS solution, a clustered [1] XFS. Where I got mixed stories was where CXFS would be available. Some said the hooks would be in all version of XFS, while others claimed CXFS would only be available on Irix.
This was further confused with refering to the either the whole sha-bang, or just XFS as an *appliance*. I recall asking at the time "Oh, you mean like Tivo?" The response was similiar to the adage about Radio Shack: "You got questions? We have blank stares."
In a similiar vein, I really haven't answered your question, other than to provide a little perspective. I do suspect the story itself puts insight into the last question...
[1] having come from an automotive background, and having friends in the military, this one did cause projectile coffee..... [2]
[2] and, I guess, gives some insight into what passes for marketing at SGI.
If SGI go it will mean that large scale SMP is essentially dead, I believe that they're the only people other then IBM doing systems > 64 CPU's at the moment, and IBM don't scale all the way up to 512 CPU's.
Well, no. There are plenty of other companies, they just aren't very well known. You have Unisys, Craig(I think they still exist), Fujitsu, and I'm sure there are others.
Bullish Machine Tzar
To add to the MS/SGI conspiracy theory: many people felt that the MS/SGI Fahrenheit 3D library was a deliberate attempt by Microsoft to drain resources from SGI into a fruitless project (Many of the people saying this were working on Fahrenheit and are now colleagues or ex-colleagues of mine). When the project was canned this is exactly what it turned out to be: a fruitless waste of resource. The direct assault on OpenGL by MS is also well documented.
You are incorrect. Reverse splits are possible on the NYSE. Delisting is not automatic and there is discretion by the exchange. They would certainly see a last minute reverse split as suspect. Also keep in mind that a split / reverse split does not change the market capitalization of the stock (number of stocks outstanding x share price). The NYSE policy for delisting is for a stock to trade under $1 for 30 consecutive days. If you look at SGI its been closing under $1 for the past 6 months! AT&T did a reverse 5-to-1 split a few years ago.
The first time I ever heard about Hypertransport (long before it was available on any motherboards) it was from a friend of mine who works on drivers at AMD. His exact words were "you are going to be happy, the upcoming Nvidia motherboard is going to use the same architecture as your O2."
I asked him "they are putting a crossbar in a PC motherboard?"
He responded "they are calling it hypertransport, but it is the exact same thing. We have been working with them on it, and it is going to be the center of their new Nforce boards."
All press releases aside, AMD was well aware of the SGI crossbar, and Nvidia had the rights to the technology to make it happen on a PC.
As far as the Nvidia cards go, of course they are original designs. I'm not saying they aren't. However, they are original cards being designed by ex-SGI engineers, with access to over a decade of SGI graphics research. Just look at the huge difference between the TNT line of cards (before they acquired SGI's resources) and the Geforce/Quadro line of cards (after they acquired SGI's resources).
You see, its ignorant statements like this that make me think you're a primadonna poser. No operating system better supports threaded coding, SMP, and user mode applications (on a predominant commercial level) for HIGH RELIABILITY. (There might be something from SGI that could be described as more desirable.) Anything with higher availablity, you're going to have to go to mainframes. (Yeah, go do cutting edge stuff with that.) As for their SPARC hardware, it actually beats out Apple in putting out slow, obsolete, putrid crap.
Name one other large scale computer services company with better technical support (for administrators). HP??? I'd rather deal with Indian subcontinent natives. Granted, if you need something resolved in ten minutes, its not going to happen. But I'm not aware of any technical support service on their scale that fixes it in ten minutes. You start out with the tier 1 losers, and work your way up. If all the components came from Sun or their partners, and you're not running the bleeding edge, you will eventually get someone who can fix your problem.
There's nothing about Solaris 10 that would make me think I'd be better off with 9 or 8. (Then again, I don't work with highly-scaled platforms.) If anything, I'm disturbed at how infrequently I'm seeing patches released for Slowlaris 10.
Now if you're a developer, that's a different story. Crappy development tools, yes. Unless you're running something so esoteric you actually need DTRACE to help figure out the problem. Then there is no substitute. Awww, you have to use a CLI? If you bitch about that, you're not a competent developer. Go back to your windoze box and write graphics games. Its not about the size of the box, its the size of the man.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
You are either very young, or very naive. The HyperTransport Technology Consortium was founded in what, late 2001-early 2002? It's charter members included AMD, NVIDIA, and SGI, as well as several other companies like Apple, Cisco and Sun. SGI came to the table already having the crossbar architecture, which they had been using in the late '90s, and which they got from Cray when they acquired them. NVIDIA already had most of SGI's engineering staff by the time the consortium was formed, and while ATI might well be a member of the consortium today, they certainly weren't one of the charter members, and certainly didn't have any HyperTransport products out back in 2002. You know, just because a company says "we invented that" on their webpage doesn't mean they really did, or every computer advancement ever would have been done by Microsoft. I hate to step on the image you have of your heroes over at AMD, but I have worked with people at AMD, I have trained with people over at AMD, and I have had a lot of friends who worked at AMD over the years. I assure you, no one at AMD woke up one day in 2001 and said "hey, I have a completely new idea for how to design system architecture. Let's start a consortium and make this an industry standard." Someone at NVIDIA said "hey, we have these guys from SGI who have this really neat architecture, and SGI says they are cool with us using it, so why don't we start up a working group and figure out how to get this to work with a PCI bus." My memory is neither faulty, nor are any of the people I know at AMD idiots. The name HyperTransport might well have been 100% AMD, but the technology isn't.
SGI also carries ~$265 million in debt. While not part of the purchase price, assuming this debt makes it a more expensive proposition for purchasers...