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SGI Warns That Bankruptcy Might Be Year-End Option
tbcpp writes "OS News reports: "SGI issued its most ominous regulatory filing to date, warning that a bad 2006 could force the former high-flyer into bankruptcy. In order to improve its business, SGI will consider measures ranging from axing or selling off product lines to pursuing 'a strategic partner or acquirer.' The hardware maker will basically look at anything and everything to remain a going concern.""
A question and a comment:
How will this affect Opengl or is it completely independent of SGI now?
I recently took an opengl class at SGI in Mountain View. The class and material was good but the desktop SGI machines were less than impressive. The final application I ended up with ran at 20 fps on the SGI machine and at 250 fps on my vanilla dell 2.5ghz pentium with intel integrated graphics. I mean come on, they are supposed to be the graphics dudes. I forget which SGI model it was but is was a weirdly shaped purple mini-tower (couldn't stack anything on top of it, thats for sure). If they hoped to ever sell anything to the classroom attendees then they shouldn't have given us something that made them look so bad.
I mean, they have been circling for like 6 years now.
I have a friend there, he says the've lost money for 28 straight quarters. The layoffs they do EVERY quarter don't exactly help morale, either.
They're a premium brand, and USED to have cool stuff. They got passed in the graphics business, their bet on Itanium turned out to be a turkey, and the government isn't buying SGI stuff like they used to -- they used to have some nice hookups there.
Turn out the lights, the party's over.
Their competitors were smart enough to patent their own research, and then cross-licence the technology. They tried a lawsuit against Nvidia which was settled through cross licensing. 3dfx tried a lawsuit with Nvida, ran out of money, and ended up being bought up. If SGI tried any funny business now, they would end up like 3dfx.
SGI gave us whizbang graphics, spiffy NUMA stuff, and XFS (and more, let the list begin here). Some of the people there are obviously clever.
Don't forget the Standard Template Library.
Might wanna download all the docs before the bankruptcy court pulls the plug on the servers.
Specialty hardware and OS's are going away. It is just too much RnD money to sink into chipsets that will only go into a few thousand machines, let alone the software layers required to make working with that power easy.
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Intel seems to think that throwing $10 billion at Itanium development isn't too much money.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
They backed the wrong horse (Itanium) and don't appear to have a Plan B.
Linux killed SGI, not Itanium. I've always argued that Linux is a far greater threat to traditional unix vendors. like Sun and SGI, than to Microsoft. Sun and SGI sold many systems to users who did not really need anything Sun or SGI specific. For some they just needed a generic unix box and a PC running Linux was a whole hell of a lot cheaper than a Sun. With PC graphics cards getting decent 3D hardware, some found a PC running Linux was a whole hell of a lot cheaper than SGI. I saw this at school where PCs replaced Suns unless you could state a need for something Sun specific, few did. I saw similar things in the chemical industry with PC doing day-to-day visualization and modeling, Sun and SGI boxes became rare.
Back to the school example, ironically, the switch from Sun to PC/Linux was also a win for Microsoft. Somewhere along the line they decided to have the PCs dual boot.
Interestingly, recently I've seen a slight shift away from Linux towards Mac OS X. Apple is doing some good outreach to unix developers, academics, etc.
SGI made (and still makes many SMP Intel boxes). We still use SGI 1300 (Quad PIII) on FreeBSD everyday. Do more research!
have pretty skechy Linux support,
You wouldn't run Linux on them, I hope. When you're running a classic UNIX box with high end graphics, you don't want whatever graphics support 'the hackers' have come up with, particularly when you're running a formerly rare expensive framebuffer. The same is true when running Sun's classic 'High End' framebuffers. The cg14 just isn't hacker friendly without the full docs that Sun won't provide.
They already sold their entire patent portfolio to Microsoft several years ago (1998?) for ~$60M in an attempt to stay alive. Very sad.
As far as I understand it, it seems the Standard Implementation is licensed under a BSD, mozilla alike license
s e.html
http://www.sgi.com/products/software/opengl/licen
Yeah it's not like Palm has anything in common with Apple (sarcasm). Most people who think Apple/SGI "makes sense" haven't been paying any attention whatsoever to SGI over the last 10 years or so.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
O2s had MIPS chips- R5k, R10k
SGI didn't switch to Itanium until they no longer had the money to keep MIPS competitve. For years SGI machines have been used almost exclusively for scientific work, which Itanium is great for. They probably would've been better off dropping MIPS sooner.
SGI's problem is they only want to sell really high end systems. They want the high margin, low volume products. The problem is as PCs eat their marketshare, they compensate by focusing on even higher end products. I've talked with their salesmen about the issue, and they're actually rather proud of their business model. They absolutely refuse to consider lower margin, higher volume products. Looks like they're determined to stick with the business model until it the end.
Technically, they are actually 2 CPUs per node.
Also, their large systems contain many times the amount of physical memory than the Opteron
can possibly even address (16TB+), not to mention that the Itanium's far larger caches go
much further in helping the interconnect to scale than Opterons.
Not to mention the fact that Itanium2 is currently significantly faster than the fastest
Opteron in most floating point workloads (on the order of about 25% for specfp).
Finally, SGI gets obscene discounts from Intel for their chips. It is fairly likely that the
price/performance is actually better than what AMD would care to offer.
So emotional arguments aside, why do you think SGI made a misstep with Itanium? The I2 is
a really good chip for them.
O2's weren't teal.
O2's weren't $20,000.
You're spot on on everything else.
XML causes global warming.
Yep. I have to agree with that. Instead of continuing Mips R10/12k development and continuing with IRIX, Belluzzo told all the engineers taht Mips and IRIX were dead... before there was anythign to switch to! I could hear the resumes being updated even as he spoke.
SGI's greatest asset was its amazing engineers. Many strategies would have been possible for a management team that understood the power of the people SGI has in their engineering organization. Belluzzo was a commodity, cookie cutter guy. He couldn't create his way out of a paper bag. Good riddance.
Steve, a former SGI system software developer
and many of those things like GLX (what allows to use opengl in X environments) was done by SGI. There's a list of OSS projects at the SGI site
There's a LOT of SGI people around the linux kernel (and not just for XFS) for example. Things like the numa-aware slab allocator, cpusets, or the swap migration (new in 2.6.16) or other tons of scalability improvements that I can't remember habe been done by SGI people. If SGI loses, Linux loses a bit of horsepower.
1. The Cray aguisition
The whole company focused on the highend and integrating Cray's technology and took it's eye off the low end commodity market.
2. Windows NT 3.5.1
The first version of NT that was stable and made the developers of scientific and CAD apps and universities (SGI's bread and butter) to take Microsoft seriouslly.
3. Ego and denial
Tom Jermoluk and Ed McCracken refused to admit there was a 500lb pink elephant in the middle of the board room with Intel and Microsoft logos tatooed on it's ass. Jim Clark didn't, but he lost a power struggle with McCracken and went AWOL until he resurfaced with Netscape. By the time SGI decided to build Wintel boxes, it was too late.
4. The Internet boom
SGI's heyday pre-dated the 'net boom and when the boom hit their talent pool was drained by startups such as nVidia.
5. Re-inventing the wheel
Few of SGI's products ever "evolved". Once they completed rev. 1, they threw it into the market and went completely back to the drawing board to reinvent something brand new instead of evolving (and supporting) existing products.
6. Developing for the sexy, not the practical
SGI's products were sexy and they demoed great but the reality was that the flashy capabilities targeted the small, niche markets like entertainment while they ignored more practical (but un-sexy) features which made them more valuable in larger markets such as CAD.
7. Horribly late in bringing products to market
The O2 and Octane workwstations, as well as their last decent graphics card, were 1.5 - 2 yrs late in coming to market. By the time they were announced they weren't competitive and comprimises had to be made to shoehorn the latest processors from MIPS into them. And the O2's graphics were hardwired to the motherboard and couldn't be upgraded. And as detailed in #6, they were loaded with features that demoed well but almost nobody used (e.g. Octane's crossbar bus technology). And then McCracken handed development of the Wintel box off to the same group that screwed up the O2 and the made the exact same mistakes again.
8. No clue on Wintel
As mentioned above, the group that developed the O2 was handed the keys to develop SGI's first Wintel offering and they made the exact same mistakes. Horribly late to market, loaded with features few people used, and with graphics that were hardwired to the motherboard and couldn't be upgraded. They even went as far as to build a custom BIOS incompatible with existing BIOS-based tools such as Ghost. When sys admins evaluated the boxes, they said "wait a minute.... I can't use my existing admin tools with this thing.... forget it."
9. Fahrenheit
Just as John Carmack had given OpenGL the shot in the arm it needed and it was gaining incredible momentum against Direct3D, SGI made a deal with the devil to merge OpenGL and Direct3D. Fahrenheit never saw the light of day, OpenGL lost it's momentum, SGI's CEO got a high paying gig at Microsoft, and OpenGL is going to be a second class citizen in Vista. SGI also gave up it's efforts on scenegraph and large model APIs which would've differentiated OpenGL even further.
*sigh* so sad
The time I spent working for SGI was one of the most rewarding experiences in my career.
Bollocks, Microsoft owns various ex-SGI patents, but OpenGL is really just a trademark.
Anyone can make an OpenGL implementation, they cannot call it OpenGL or use the logo though, unless they joing the ARB and pay dues but that's a low barrier to entry.
Once they do that there's a LOT of patents held by all sorts of companies regarding OpenGL implementations.
Contributors in the ARB have agreed to permit use of all sorts of patents relating to OpenGL by everyone else in the ARB for their OpenGL implementations. So basically OpenGL permits free use of the I.P. required to implement OpenGL. There are limits but companies in the ARB had to declare potential conflicting intellectual property as part of the agreement they were in.
This included SGI when they held the patents and in included Microsoft up until they left the ARB, (and this would have been the reason they quit the ARB, new shader related I.P.).