SGI Announces MIPS and IRIX End of Production

ramakant writes "Considering the recent news regarding their dismal financial situation, it should come as no surprise that SGI announced end of production for MIPS based hardware and the IRIX operating system. From the article: "SGI launched the MIPS/IRIX family of products in 1988. Since then, this technology has powered servers, workstations, and visualization systems used extensively in Manufacturing, Media, Science, Government/Defense, and Energy. After nearly two decades of leading the world in innovation and versatility, the MIPS IRIX products will end their general availability on December 29, 2006." IRIX has always been my favored OS, and I'll be sad to see it gone. Hopefully my O2 will survive for many years to come."

Comments

Re:MIPS is going away?

[OrangeTide]

Systems with a clean instruction set are apparently unpopular in the real world.

PowerPC is rather nice, but it's not as clean. (but it is easier to use)

Re:MIPS is going away?

[ajlitt]

MIPS isn't going away. MIPS is very popular for embedded video processing. TiVo is MIPS (now, at least), the PSP is MIPS, and many DVD players are based on a MIPS. MIPS is still popular because the ISA isn't patented and there are a number of compatible cores out there.

Re:MIPS is going away?

[10Ghz]

SGI MIPS-workstations are going away, MIPS itself is not going anywhere, It's still running in millions of embedded devices, and more will be announced in the future.

Such a crowded graveyard, big deal.

[museumpeace]

Apollo, DEC, Amdahl, Prime, RCA, Remington Rand, GE, Univac, Perkin Elmer, MassComp, Concurrent Computer, Compaq, Sequent, Encore, Xerox, Scientific Data Systems, Wang, GO corporation...and so many more.

The only lesson you could profit from in all this carnage is knowing when to sell your shares, when to find a good merger rather than waiting for the bankers to hold a fire sale of your patent portfolio.

If you read all the way to the bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of us who still work at SGI and continue to support this product line,
also of importance at the bottom of the article is:

SGI is also committed to offering our customer a full level of support needed to protect their investment in SGI products. End of support (EOS) for MIPS/IRIX products is currently scheduled for no sooner than December 2013. SGI Technology Solutions is continuously evaluating the demand for extended support and may consider longer extensions if necessary.

Re:MIPS is going away?

[LWATCDR]

I will answer. None at all.
This announcement is about the end of MIPS as a server and workstation platform. The vast majority of CPUs are not used for server or workstations. They live in toasters, DVD players, digital cameras, microwaves, and so on. In the real world very few people ever write assembly programs that run on a server or a workstation. However in the embedded space assembly is still pretty common.
MIPS isn't dead. MIPS servers are dead. MIPS lives on in many devices.