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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
You would think that the SGI name has enough high end appeal that nVidia or ATI would want to market SGI branded video cards. SGI could certainly be had cheap.
an ill wind that blows no good
You know, when you bring something back from the dead, it's never quite the same again, and you usually wish you hadn't. Let the company die while people still have fond memories of the brand, I say.
Oh no... it's the future.
When SGI started selling intel based workstations, it was pretty much over.
The expensive add on video card did little to add value compared to the hp/dells of the world.
We have some SGI (Irix) based software here we ported fairly easily to solaris.
SGI is still in business???
The company is going through a major re-org. They will probably do things very differently after emerging from Ch 11. You could say that the "old ways" at SGI are indeed dying. But the company as a business entity is not.
Chapter 11 does not equal a death sentence, it's often just a way of flipping the bird to the creditors - that's what most people don't realize.
...is that SGI's least-expesive system costs a nice $9,800. That's for one computer, running windows or linux. Basically a nice PC. Granted, it comes with 2GB ram, and some nice features. But still... ...and people thought Apple was expensive...
They did just break a memory bandwidth record yesterday.
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http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060717/sfm024.html?.v
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
For more than a few years SGI has just been a big "game" to the execs and the board of directors who allowed the charade and obfuscation to go on.
SGI cancelled their annual shareholder meeting in December.
They barely gave us a conference call in January.. McKenna wouldn't say anything.. And they've cancelled every call after that.
I sold my last shares long ago (except for one) and I hope they get sued into oblivion.
Apple should buy SGI (patents, know-how, take whatever they can from IRIX, OpenGL, etc) and kill off the rest of the stuff they dont need or cant sell.
We (The Dutch Weather Service) bought an Altix in April.
Their hardware rocks. The software - though complex, on three racks using a common file system - works.
I never believed in Itaniums, but for our code (heavy vectorizable, large memory models) they fly.
In short, if SGI collapses, in our market the loss will be quite noticeable.
Don't you mean, "That's the way the NUMA flexes"?
The problem with SGI is that they don't really have any compelling products anymore. They have some Linux-based HPC stuff, but I think they've lost the early lead they might have had (as a result of their clustering experience for graphics stuff) in that market to IBM. Then they have some Itanium workstations, which are hideously overpriced, and aside from being Itanium seem to pretty much be a run-of-the-mill workstation in a neat case. (About the only feature they have that you can't get on something from Sun/HP/IBM is a binary compatibility layer for running IRIX applications side-by-side with Linux ones.) And then of course they have some IRIX workstations, for the few people who still have a business reason for staying with IRIX.
... meaning they're not going to be purchasing a lot of new gear.
But most of the people still running IRIX are doing so because they have legacy applications that they need to use, which assumedly already runs on their existing hardware
SGI is rapidly running of of stuff to sell. What they do make looks really neat (gotta love purple), and I'd love to have one under my desk, but it's tough to come up with a business case for the premium it seems like they have to charge in order to stay afloat.
As much as I hate to say it, being someone who's drooled over SGI gear for years, I think they need to exit the hardware business. Or perhaps license the SGI hardware brand out to someone else, to use as their high-end workstation brand. Then pare the company back and concentrate on software for the very high-end visualization markets, and perhaps offer consulting services for people converting from IRIX to Linux.
It seems like they tried to play IRIX for far too long after the writing was on the wall, and the gamble with Itanium didn't help either. Running a single-vendor OS on what's rapidly becoming a single-vendor hardware platform isn't something that many people are going to be interested in.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As far as I can tell, SGI will not have a booth at Siggraph.org. That says something.
The real problem here is how to do something that is different enough and desirable enough that people will pay more to buy it than the cost of making a mainstream box do it. Apple does this with an extremely well polished, well mannered software environment where everything "just works." There is a niche for that product class that won't be overtaken by Windows PCs anytime soon (or Linux PCs, for that matter.)
SGI's systems were well designed, but the problem was computing power increased to the point where the price/performance benefit of their boxes got too small to warrant serious consideration. Power became plentiful and cheap, and SGI's clients were Unix nerds so they could make other solutions work if they presented more cost effective alternatives. Even if those solutions were less elegant, they resulted in a better profit yield. In a free market that's enough to make the decision.
It's like that Dilbert cartoon segmenting customers - Smart customers are never a good bet. Of course that's exaggeration, but Apple appeals to those who want their computer to Stay Out Of The Way. That market segment is much less sensitive to hardware technology change, which is why Apple has lasted so long. Apple's customers don't WANT to be "smart" about computers, so they select a system that doesn't demand that. SGI's customers were high end power users - they were and are smart about computers. So when the technology changed, their users followed the changes.
I would like to see some smaller companies again push the limites of what we think of as "standard" computer designs, but as SGI has learned there is no money in such work and fabrication costs are prohibitive. The Lisp machines died out years ago, even more thoroughly. Maybe MOSIS and co will let someone get creative again, but for now the market seems to have decided, and the decision is for cheap and disposable.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
If OpenGL is going to be up for sale shouldn't the Free Software Foundation buy it? Otherwise couldn't Microsoft buy it and sit on it, preventing any real improvement on Direct3D's cross-platform competitor?
Why doesn't SGI just admit they're no longer needed to make computers, and just make graphics cards? Make the best OpenGL "accelerator" chips, give away lower-performance OpenGL libraries for free to keep the API popular and capture a new generation of developers. Sell some overpriced complete systems from mostly commodity HW to the high-end film and TV studios that need them. And release all the fancy extra tech accumulated over the years as plugins to apps actually successfully marketing them under other brands.
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make install -not war
That company had the most excellent name, and was perfectly in step to move into the 21st century, and they blew it. It may really have been as simple, and as petty, as changing the name, that started their boulder down the hill.
But as far as I was concerned they missed the boat in '95 or so. My company wanted to buy SGI systems for graphics work, but for any reasonable amount of money at the time, the systems were entirely underpowered compared even to cheap consumer PC's running Photoshop. We had a huge budget, and the machines SGI tried to sell us were absolutely horrible, by anybody's standards. So their high end was probably better, but we didn't get the hook in our mouth so we never would have known.
So who would the best buyer be if there was really a price on the table for OpenGL? I have always thought that they should just make GPU's and forget the rest, except maybe for that NASA supercomputer, the beast that it is.
i would think any one of the companies currently on the ARB should be the ones that get to bid. any one of those would be favorable. Nvidia would be a great steal. ATI is in bed with DirectX and MS so i dunno about them. can IBM handle it? Apple would also be a good steal. what do you think?
I would use this oppurtunity to buy Irix and use it to build the next windows ala Mac OS X. Just graft a new UI based on the aero code on top and presto...secure os with really memory management, XFS, clustering and more. Legacy apps could run in a virtualization layer and Microsoft would get a solid, tried and true OS that is also proprietary and closed-source. It would be a big job to replicate windows on a UNIX base (especially on the server) but I suspect it wouldn't take as long as Vista has.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
As noted elsewhere in this thread, an individual Altix machine is ludricously expensive (even for an Itanium machine). However, the interconnect on an Altix extremely capable -- up to 512 processors* in a single system image, very low latency. For certain applications, this -- the NUMA model -- is very big win. Whether putting Itaniums into this very nice interconnect is cost-effective really depends on your specific application: how much cache does it need, its computation to communication ratio.
- _Quinn
*: I guess this means a 1024 cores, now that Montecito's out.
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
I have to laugh at comments like these as they can only be made by people who either have never used Sun hardware or software, or no longer keep up with the marketplace. Innovations that Sun continues to pump out (i.e. Sun x4600, x4500, Sol10, ZFS, DTrace, etc.) certainly deserve recognition and are highly useful. I use and admin all types of machines and OS's (mostly UNIX variants), and Sun certainly continues to be useful and relevant. In fact, they're better than most vendors in most areas.
But more and more the linux renderfarm world is taking over. Hey even Discreet is switching to IBM, Opterons and Linux. That is a day many thought would never come. I own a Origin 2000 and it rocks. I'm sorry to see SGI go. The Octane Rocked, hey even my O2 is a neat machine.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
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.
and IBM, and Sun. from a business perspective, IRIX and GL were simply ways for SGI to sell boxes, the same way OS X is "just" a way for Apple to sell boxes. grandparent needs to realize that stand-along OS or system software companies are the exception (Microsoft being the only really successful one, and that's largely due to a collection of other market forces; more commonly, they end up like SCO).
application software is somewhat different; there's a more viable market there. but SGI's not known for any of that; are they really likely to go head-to-head with folks like Adobe and Apple and win, starting nearly from scratch?
no, hardware remains the best bet for SGI to recover, if there's any way at all to pull it off.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
SGI has nothing Apple wants.
The only competing market space they shared was the hollywood production market, which has been taken over by Apple anyway. Apple doesn't need Opterons, Intel has been playing catch up and the new Xeon 5100s are Opteron-killers. 'Xserve' in general is nice hardware, but it's too pricey and offers little over other 1U rackmounts if you're not running a 100% mac environment. IRIX has been dead for years, SGI has been selling Linux boxes since 2001 or so.
The problem is SGI has nothing *anyone* wants. They made some sweet, high-powered workstations, but unfortunately for them the tasks people were doing with the machines didn't scale in complexity as fast as commodity PCs did. A few years of management blunders later and they are just another computer maker with nothing to offer over Sun, IBM, HP or even Dell.