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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
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:
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)