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SGI Files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
audi100quattro writes "The WSJ has a story about SGI filing for bankruptcy, but the SGI Investor's Relation page doesn't say anything." Nothing else really known at this point, but this is not unexpected.
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Silicon Graphics Files
For Chapter 11 Protection
A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP
May 8, 2006 6:56 a.m.
Silicon Graphics Inc., a long-struggling maker of high-performance computers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
A group of bondholders agreed to trade their debt for a stake in the company, which filed for Chapter 11 protection Monday morning in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan.
SGI is known for desktop workstations and larger server systems that are favored by engineers and others who demand sophisticated graphics, including Hollywood studios. But the company has suffered a long slide, partly due to competition from machines based on standard components used in personal computers.
The company's stock was recently delisted from the New York Stock Exchange for trading below a minimum threshold of $1 a share, and now trades on the small-cap OTC Bulletin Board.
Earlier this year, SGI replaced its top executive amid widening losses and lower revenue. Last month, the company said it expected revenue of about $108 million for the third fiscal quarter, well below guidance of $140 million to $160 million.
SGI's press release here: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060508/sfm098.html?.v= 45
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
So the question is are the SGI workstations worth the cost? Is SGI going to survive.
And for karma whoring here is the wikipedia index on SGI's history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics
My question is; where they contributing anything new to the maket recently
It may not be all that "recent", but if you're a C++ programmer, you might want to download a copy of this documentation before the bankruptcy trustees pull the plug on the server:
Info about the Chapter 11 is up now, via a press release:
l eases/2006/may/sgi_reorg.html
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_re
From the release:
"As part of this agreement with many of its major stakeholders, and as the next step in its previously announced plan to reorganize its businesses, the Company and its U.S. subsidiaries have filed voluntary petitions under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. SGI's non-U.S. subsidiaries, including European, Canadian, Mexican, South American and Asia Pacific subsidiaries were not included in the filing; will continue their business operations without supervision from the U.S. courts; and will not be subject to the requirements of chapter 11. The Company expects to file its Plan of Reorganization reflecting the agreement shortly, and to emerge from Chapter 11 within six months."
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
Will make those new look and feel updates to Slashdot all the more easy to create.
Heck, I use a Powerbook G4 for most of my tasks these days and my SGI O2 and SGI 320 NT box in my office are used little these days, but the Macs do lack some advanced hardware features that are only available on Infinite Reality gfx boards and Tezro v12. See Discreet's website and you'll notice that Flame, Inferno and Fire still run on ONLY SGI hardware. SGI InfiniteReality boards are used as image generators for flight military flight simulators and also to drive the Inferno compositing and film mastering, using up to 32 film resolution layers and 10-bit anti-aliased graphics
Sure, Nvidia and ATI cards go have an polygon count advantage and they do have features like pixel and vertex shaders, but overall for high fidelity graphics one still goes back to SGIs. If one looks at what is capable in Final Cut Pro HD, it still falls in terms of output quality compared to what an SGI can handle. For video DMediaPro options with support for two streams of high-definition 10-bit 4:4:4:4 RGBA video. Or if one needed to generate your own video signal. Programmable FPGA video card or drive a C.A.V.E. or Powerwall SGI Mutichannel Option cards are capable of doing this. I have yet to see PC based Image Generator be as successful at doing this without a lot of hacking, blood, sweat and tears. SGI's handle the tough visualization tasks do out of the box. SGI's gfx API are second to none
OpenGL Inventor
OpenGL Multipipe (+ SDK)
OpenGL Optimizer
OpenGL Performer
OpenGL Shader
OpenGL Vizserver
OpenGL Volumizer
ImageVision and Image Format Library (IFL)
SGI was a great company, although it was badly mismanaged. I'd love to see it merged with Apple and all the SGI gfx API's integrated into OS X. Plus other tecnologies like ccNUMA, XFS, CXFS, NUMAlink4 (6.4GBs), NUMAflex combined with Hypertransport and Infiniband (when customers need cheaper solution than NUMAlink)
SGI did not own the Internet space. Just because they had those on their platform doesn't mean they "owned" anything.
Mosaic - and shortly afterward, Netscape - was on every platform you can name. Httpd was supported on all those platforms too. By the time the "Internet revolution" and all the hype (and corruption) that drove up the stock market in the 90s, SGI was in the beginning of it's decline.
Sure, they had a great campus, they had great people working for them, but it didn't take long for it to come crashing down around them.
Which is unfortunate. SGI was a pretty cool place.
... to mirror the STL progammer's guide (for personal use, of course).
It's sad to see them go, and not just for their cool h/w. This is the company that brought us OpenGL and, for a long time, the only useful STL documentation on the web (not to mention Irix had a working c++ compiler). I can almost forgive them for IRIX 6.5.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Sorry, the first web browser was also the first "full GUI HTML editor." WorldWideWeb.app by Tim Berners Lee.
No.
and now that SGI will more than likely be leaving the playing field, wont this mean that OGL will belong to microsoft?
No, the OpenGL ARB controls OpenGL, not SGI. Check the website.
who will more than likely take it, lock it up, and sue the living fuck out of anyone who implements it? (read, makes free software implementations without paying absurd royalty costs)
No. SGI is far from the most important company relying on OpenGL. Check the ARB member list: 3DLabs, Apple, ATI, Dell, IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, SGI, and Sun Microsystems.
OpenGL is fine.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Linux on SGI's MIPS workstations is already pretty usable. The core site is at http://www.linux-mips.org/, plus both Gentoo and Debian have functional MIPS Ports [ G | D ].
:)
Between both distro's, most of SGI's systems from the Indy to the Octane are supported (although support for the individual components is dependent on the machine). We're hoping to get our hands on some of their newer stuff, like a Fuel or an Origin 300 to see how hard that will be to port to (especially the R14000), but the dream is to one day (hopefully before the year 3000) get Linux running on a quad-cpu Tezro
This is just to get rid of debt and stuff like that. The people who actually own the company believe there's great potential and they seem determined to do all it takes to turn the company around.
The current management is very different from the old one. It can be argued, and it has been argued before, that it was a succession of management mistakes which brought the company to its current situation. But the old mistakes seem to be a thing of the past now.
So, good engineering + bad management = financial difficulties. That's the past.
The present: good engineering + good management.
Stay tuned, there's more to this story than it seems.
I worked with IRIX at some point of my career. Nothing impressive, mind you.
I keep hearing this from ex-Irix and Solaris users. Solaris and Irix were the best unixes at one point (1990's). However, their greatness was internal, in the kernel. Most users never got to see it.
I've never used Irix, but speaking for Solaris, the user land was pretty archaic and clumsy (the commands and utilities) compared to the GNU userland (the commands on Linux). Sun finally realised this in 2004 and started migrating the GNU user-land into core Solaris. See Solaris 10 which is available free to download and the source of which can be obtained from opensolaris.org.
Stick Men
OpenGL ARB is a group that is independent of SGI. They will keep on going on; with folks like Apple, Sun and IBM, and the major card manufacturers behind them, I don't think Unix folks have anything to fear. I wonder what major stuff SGI was contributing lately, anyway?
OpenGL is now a "industry group"/board for long time.
e s/mp_browse
http://www.opengl.org/
Whatever (sad!) happens, nothing happens to OpenGL.
Look at members
http://opengl.org/about/arb/overview/
It is kind of similar to hardware, the PowerPC board. So when Apple gives up PowerPC, nothing happens to powerPC since
http://www.power.org/kshowcase/view/browse_profil
If Apple did not give up powerPC and it went chap. 11, Power Architecture would still continue.