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Is the Game Finally up for SGI?
Rob writes to mention a Computer Business Review article looking at the bankruptcy of SGI, and whether the company is planning on a comeback. CEO Dennis McKenna is emphatic that the company isn't just looking for an exit strategy, but it's hard to see where they could go from here. From the article: "SGI has more challenges ahead, and I still find it hard to believe that after all of the chances it has had to run a profitable server and visualization business in the past it can miraculously do so now, selling lower-end boxes on even slimmer margins. But I'm hoping that the Chapter 11 has provided the necessary wake-up call for the company to get really lean really fast, because only from a more stable financial footing does it have any hope of fighting its way back onto new technology buyers' wish-lists."
...the Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. error seems oddly appropriate.
We used to use SGI for everything related to virtual worlds... and carried on doing so when they moved to NT. About 6 months later someone noticed that we could swap expensive SGI boxes for cheap white boxes and save a fortune, then migrate all the legacy code without much pain to RedHat... and that was the end of SGI for us.
I do have a very nice SGI Indigo foot rest however.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Gee, I had my Slashdot article on the SGI bankruptcy rejected back on May 8th when it actually happened. Two months later, the bankruptcy gets a mention on Slashdot.
SGI's main remaining business is real estate. They own many buildings in Mountain View, most of which they lease to Google. Due to some bad decisions (like signing up for a 55-year land lease in 1995) SGI loses money on that deal. Then they tried a sale/leaseback deal with Goldman Sachs and dug themselves a bigger hole by locking in their rent at the top of the dot-com boom. A friend at Google says that SGI is a "great landlord", though.
SGI doesn't really have much left in the way of manufacturing facilities. The only thing left is Chippewa Falls, the old Cray facility. They had 1,858 employees left at the start of the bankruptcy. SGI had way too much legacy administrative overhead. They had 18 different corporate entities, from Cray to MIPS to Parallel to Alias/Wavefront, and 43 more marketing subsidiaries in various countries. Most of those organizations will disappear in the bankruptcy.
From the filing: In the last several years, SGI has faced a number of challenges, which, taken together, have had a negative impact on SGI's overall financial performance. In the late 1990's, SGI made a series of investments in strategies and technologies that yielded less than the expected results.
Er, right.
Realistically, what happened is that SGI was totally unable to cope with their high-margin business becoming a low-margin business. Few companies succeed at that transition, IBM being a notable exception. And even IBM finally bailed out of PCs.
An NVidia Quadro card isn't very different from a GeForce card. The biggest difference is the drivers are optimized for visual accuracy, whereas the GeForce drivers will take shortcuts to improve the frame rate.
If you go for something like a Wildcat card, the cards tend to focus on raw numbers of polygons more than on effects (although they've been improving in those aspects in recent years). A few years ago I worked in a department that did Computational Fluid Dynamics. The results came out as a mesh with lots of data points at each mesh point. We'd view the results in 3D by just adding shading to the models. The points would be given a color on a red to blue scale (think weather charts) with the graphics card interpolating the colors along the polygon surface. We compared a then high end Quadro card with a 2 year old Wildcat card. The Wildcat completely blew away the Quadro in performance.
Also of note, the graphics cards in the then 5 year old SGI workstations seemed to hold their own against the Quadro card. I don't remember which was faster, but they were close enough in performance that you didn't really notice a difference unless you were looking for it.