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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
I worked with IRIX at some point of my career. Nothing impressive, mind you. But the machine was stylish and the aura of "eliteness" leaked from every vent grill. Onyxes, Octanes, Origins... They could be beat by a low-level GPU these days, but back then, they were wet dreams coming true.
I'm sad to see them go. Not surprised, but still a bit sad.
Erwin will need a new home...
They'll add it in with green-screen later.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
...I'm surprised it took this long. After throwing over their own OS for NT workstations and losing the high-end specialty graphics market, they veered into supercomputers and bought Cray, which didn't help either company, and they haven't done anything interesting in years. RIP SGI
I know it was inevitable. I know the economics. I know various other things but still...still...it's a sad, sad day.
Cheers,
Ian
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:
Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man. -- Trotsky
I don't think they stopped doing what they were doing - they just never came up with a strategy to handle the new reality.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
When your core business is high end and you push products through lots of R&D then have your market sapped by commodity products, its easy to overstep your budget and not adjust the business quickly enough. Even worse of course if the people in charge don't see the train comming down the tracks for a long time, which is what often happens in bigger businesses. SGI is also in a more vulnerable position than say Sun because Sun can deploy a server that is expected to stay put (and need support) for many years - hell even SCO is hanging on this way! The graphics industry is constantly in the push of new and faster, so we're seeing a "Unix" company demise in accelerated time.
The money's not in hardware anymore - hasn't been for a long time unless you can supply a massive like and do it well. Professional Services is where it's at now - IBM learned this in the early 90's.
Big hardware companies need to seriously change their outlook - if it can be done with a PC, it will eventually be done with a PC cheaply, the question is not what the "box" does, it's who's the best at providing the service.
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
I remember fondly my first encounter with 3D graphics, from the TRON movies, man - that was many years ago, the SGI computers was the no.1 on my wishlist as a kid - but a machine like that where WAY too expensive, and thats where the Commodore Amiga came and stole our hearts, all of a sudden - 3D became affordable, SGI did'nt belive in "3D-for-everyone" and I believe that would be the main reason for their demise.
You've got to put your belief in the little guy on the street if you want to survive, being boss - playing big, with the big - will only work until the rest of us grow up. And we did, but SGI didn't invest in our future together, if they did - we would have embraced them without as much as a seconds hesitation, but if you keep selling to the elite party (those with WAY too much money) you're out of tune with the development.
(For those too thick to read between the lines - it simply ment, they didn't follow the times)
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
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.
My SGI shirts are now collectors items!
Woooot!
Chip H.
SGI began its rapid decline the moment the announced the merger with Cray. As the stodgy crew of maanagers went on the land grab trying to justify their existence in their "new " company, it drove out many of the long hair, fast and loose crowd of exceptional engineers who believed SGI was a magical place.
SGI truly was a magical place to be. Not only the "Its Not just a job, Its a wardrobe" pens, frisbees, t-shirts for every new product, boxer shorts, key chains, and all the other swag SGI marketing was famous for. The "O" series of products, led by the Indigo2 Max-Impact were revolutionary products. Massively fast backplanes that still exceed the performance of all but a limite few systems, incredibly fast graphics sub systems with fill rates that still can't be achieved on lowly PC gear (they just can't push the bits fast enough).
In addition, SGI truly owned the internet space, well before Sun and then gave it away once Sun started the "dot in dot.com" marketing campaign. They had the NetScape server, free, included with the IRIX OS, on every server with a full HTML configuration interface in an age where most other companies still didn't have an officially supported HTTPD for their platform. They also included Indigo Magic, the FIRST full GUI HTML editor, again, free with the OS, as well as a full GUI VRML editor, and so on.
I truly weep for the company SGI used to be. It was the best job I ever had and the one I wish had never ended.
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
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)
I hope that someone will buy their MIPS-based workstation-business. What I would like to see is for someone to take that business, beef it up a bit, and port the whole lineup to Linux. I would say that there would be a sizeable market for quality MIPS-workstations that run Linux.
How about.... HyperTransport-links between CPU's, integrated mem-controllers, on-die L2-caches, HTX-expansion, multicore, multi-CPU-setups. All this, and running Linux. Hell, those changes alone would give us a nice boost, even if the CPU-core (R16000A IIRC) itself stayed relatively same.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I never worked for SGI, but I loved the spirit of the company and their products.
I think (and thought at the time) they should have focused on a cheaper version of their products and tried to be an Apple alternative. They had the best OS out there until MacOS X came up, and it took a long time for MacOS X to work as well as Irix did. Most people aware of the company had very warm feelings about SGI products and the OS and I think they could have used that.
I reluctantly wound up switching from SGI hardware (used Indigo2s could be had for reasonable prices) to Macs about when MacOS X came out.
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.
It's not just the commodity workstations that did them in. Their high-end equipment was increasingly uncompetitive against IBM/HP/Sun. They did a lot of thrashing; they were going to compete on mid-range business systems (crushed by Sun/Linux from below and IBM/HP/Sun from above), then they were going to compete on supercomputers by buying Cray (sold the machine they didn't understand to Sun, which called it the E10000 Starfire, and sold billions, while SGI ended up selling Cray to Tera for a loss), then they hitched their star to Itaniums. There was also the issue of software quality control during the version 7 compiler development, which gained them a reputation for wonky compilers (hint: if you're selling to the HPC guys, rock-solid, DEC/IBM quality Fortran is a must), and the slipping performance advantage versus conventional PC. (The R5000 was equal, roughly, to a Pentium 233, when the PII/PIII were available for less than $2K, though you couldn't tell the SGI reps that if you waved actual simulation run times in their face)
So, in a way, gross mismanagement over a period of about a decade. The amazing thing is that it took so long to finally go bankrupt. Pity, as I remember my Indigo2 SolidImpact (with the CrystalEyes stereo adapter) rather fondly. On the other hand, I don't remember my days securing Irix nearly as fondly. Another contender who actually believed their PR, and lost sight of their market.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
I'm using this on a couple of machines. I sure hope that somebody will continue to maintain it.
This bankrupcy doesn't surprise me at all. I saw this coming for more than five years. But I remember having arguments with SGI fans who tried to defend the Indefensible.
With a Chapter 11 reorg, a potential buyer would get access to a lot of very interesting HPC technology, without a lot of liability. This is what the current bondholders are counting on - buy it while it's cheap and sell it for more to some other company.
What do you get (of any value) when you snap up SGI?
-XFS/XVM/CXFS - one of the best storage environments out there in production
-OpenGL/VAN
-DMF/TMF
-GRIO
-Numerous other subsystems to IRIX/Linux
Their hardware hasn't kept pace as well. However, there's still a lot to like about the architecture (HyperTransport looks so much like SGI-Craylink). They're about the only ones who managed to make something useful of Itanium (another straw on the camel's back). Perhaps someone could do something with it, provided they supply the needed R&D money.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
... 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
I am sorry for SGI breaking down. But I hope that Apple can learn from their mistakes. It's too late for Sun I guess.
I shall remember you, SGI, and I will think of you every time I play with my future girlfriend.
I bought a few of their systems, ranging from an R4400-based Indigo2 to an R12K based Power Challenge L. I was usually happy with the hardware, but the sales guys were really slimy, and the company made it very difficult and expensive to get basic OS and compiler updates.
A $3000 Indy might have seemed like a good deal, but when you need a thousand dollars a year worth of hardware and software contracts to support basic administration of the box, it didn't compare too well with its competition.
Of course, my POV is probably severly tainted by the fact that I just did NOT like the sales rep. Half of what came out of his mouth was BS.
On the other hand, this had to have been 10 years ago, and I should probably just get over it.
What's going to happen to OpenGL? The API can't die! I don't want to have to use DirectX! What will I use in Linux?
It's a shame, because back in the early 90's I got into comp sci and computer graphics, using Indigos and Onyx machines in all my early work. I even bought an Indy for use in college, and there's no way I would have been able to do such cool project work in school without it. It's a shame to see this, because I was as big a fan as SGI could have had back in the day, but I know the day SGI started its decline.
;-).
It was SIGGRAPH 2000. New Orleans. I got an invite to the SGI party, and we were all expecting a huge new announcement of a SGI-brand PC graphics card. This would have been the smart move, because about this time PC cards were starting to eat into SGI's markets... So why not use the amazing brand name of SGI and produce a killer PC card? So what did SGI announce? A new line of supercomputers. There were audible groans in the crowd.
Oh well, it was part of history. My Indy still works just fine, and I was even able to update to a newer version of Irix recently... And I'll still wear my SGI shirts, thankyouverymuch
--- witty signature
I am not sure there is a market for Unix workstations.
There are few things that spot opportunities as well as companies competing for space. The lack of offerings indicates the lack of a consumer market - it indicates that those who want non x-86 Unix-like desktops (and I would love to see a Niagara, MIPS, XCPU, Cell or ARM-based desktop computer - I love diversity) are very few.
Modern x86 PCs, as dull as they are, are quite capable Unix workstations and, in many respects, are well beyond any desktop system SGI ever made.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
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
Sad Sad day. I worked for them for almost seventeen years (under 1000 Employee #).....laid off about three years ago. Best company I ever worked for, and a great place to be. Some of the sharpest engineering folks I've ever seen, and the most idiotic management on the planet. The only reason SGI survived as long as it did was due to their exceptional technology (on many levels), but because of the fools at the helm, it didn't have a chance to succeed. As far as I'm concerned, even though hit continued to rise for a few years based on pure technology...the fall really started when Dr. Clark quit in frustration and went off and started Netscape.....he was the true visionary and the "Core" of the Old SGI, but the board of directors wouldn't let him take the company where it really needed to go. It's never good to dwell on what might-have-been, but in my opinion, Silicon Graphics had the potential to totally dominate and change the direction of computing as we know it at one time, but because of pure bureaucratic idiocy, was basically strangled in it's infancy. What a waste.
What's the backplane speed you refer to?
This say the GIO64 backplane speed in Indigo2 was 266MB/sec.
This was probably great then, given the limitations of FPM RAM (EDO wasn't even around yet!), but it is peanuts now. Intel's FSBs and AMDs HTs hover at about 30 times this speed now, and there are plenty of slots which exceed this speed too.
Am I missing something? I only looked this up because the amount of time SGI has been out of the loop pretty much means that their systems cannot be anything special compared to current hardware. That doesn't mean they weren't ahead of their time, just that a lot of time has passed and even things that were ahead of their time then are nothing special now.
I had a couple friends who work at SGI and I was heavy into the computer graphics market then. SGI were doomed before they bought Cray. They basically started by taking the work of Evans & Sutherland and bring it to a whole new marketplace. They realized the potential of computer graphics in a broader market, not just defense and similar companies. The problem was, the market was even broader than SGI expected.
Oddly, it was the horrible Matrox Mystique video card that signalled the end for SGI. It wasn't the first 3D PC card, but for many people, it was the first one they owned and used. It ran Tomb Raider with 3d acceleration. These kinds of cards created a whole new market for 3D hardware. This board marketbase pumped money into these companies (Matrox, ATI, S3, and soon after, NVidia) very quickly. And this allowed them to advance their hardware rapidly to the point where a well-equipped PC could match the 3D performance of an SGI box.
SGI was addicted to selling $80K workstations in small numbers, and PCs running 3D Studio Max that could be configured for a bit over $10K just overran them. SGI refused to adapt. Because of their overhead, perhaps it was impossible for SGI to adapt. So SGI was in a marketplace where a 3D workstation could only fetch $10K (and falling), with a business model and overhead (like owning your own CPU designer, writing your own OS) that made it impossible for them to compete.
End of SGI.
I don't understand your assertion that SGI was an internet player. The cost of their systems meant you couldn't afford to buy an SGI for anything that didn't involve heavy graphics, or else you'd be wasting your money. SUN really did rule the roost there, for a while. Until a broad switch to PCs whomped them too.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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.