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SGI Arises From the Ashes
eldavojohn writes "Six months ago, Slashdot reported on SGI's filing of Chapter Eleven Bankruptcy. I wondered why Slashdot kept the Silicon Graphics category with them now defunct. But Chapter Eleven means a reorganization — not liquidation. And, surprisingly, SGI has dusted itself off and stood back up. What did they dust off? About $150 million worth of spending a year. Will this reorganization put them back as a player in the graphics game? Maybe but as the article notes, they have some stiff competition that offer comparable services for less money. Is this a phoenix story or the final death throes of the company?" To be honest, no one here suspected a thing. We just keep the old topics around so it's still possible to find old stories related to them. Sometimes (like now!) they even still come in handy.
I don't think it's simply a matter of making the hardware, but having the brains left to design it. SGI once came out with the greatest stuff, but now loads of that all fits on one video card or multiple video cards with shared GPUs. Of course their old business model wasn't just to sell you the machine, but to license the software, operating system, sell support etc. Not many can do that these days, like they did in the days of yore.
We just keep the old topics around so it's still possible to find old stories related to them. Sometimes (like now!) they even still come in handy.
Call me a dreamer, but I keep hoping some day these guys will arise from the ashes of HP/Compaq and Intel.
Introducing the PDP-11/128 and the VAX 9990! (2-AAA cell batteries not included.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sheesh. That should be 'death throes'.
But we all know that SGI is a lost cause, they company would have to basically fire all of its useless upper management and rehire all the smart people that left years ago to survive in this market.
SGI stock is not worth the paper it is printed on. (not that they normally print shares anymore)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
...then I hope to god that they put Irix in line with the OS capabilities of this day. I have to support a small fleet of SGI Octanes running Irix 6.5, and damned if those aren't the slowest and most aggravating machines.
Many of the Alpha engineers transitioned to AMD. That's why we've seen such great developments from AMD over the past few years. While Intel was fucking around with the failure that became the Itanium, AMD had some of the greatest processor designers ever working on the Opteron. And the end result is as would be expected: the Opteron is the premiere general purpose processor around.
Plus, old icons give kdawson something to play with when he's bored!
[
And so are the MIPS family of processors. So are many of SGI's core businesses, like selling to the TV networks (now it's Apple-to-Avid with new stuff that simply buries SGI), stringing clientele along to the tune of numerous significant digits for incomplete and ill-designed systems.
The fact that they couldn't hold onto employees because their situation was untennable, with so many chiefs and so few worker bees, may now be changed. It's unlikely that their re-emergence from CH11 will do much to save them. Their emporer still has no clothes and is still charging by the pay-per-view model.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
"Is this a phoenix story or the final death throws of the company?" - Sheesh. That should be 'death throes'.
No, he was talking about actual "death throws". Like when Steve Ballmer gets ahold of a chair.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
If you look at their website, they say pretty clearly that they are now focused on high performance computing and storage devices. You won't see graphics mentioned on there anywhere, except for their soon to be discontinued MIPS workstation lines. They do mention visualization of data sets over networks, and in planetariums, but this is really more of a services offering. The days of buying a high performance graphics workstation from SGI appear to be over for now.
I think it would be great to have another player of graphics. As it is, we only have NVidia and ATI (who both make quality products). However, if there was another player that could do more general-purpose cards (as opposed to gaming), they could probably make some decent money, and indirectly pressure NV and ATI. Maybe open-source drivers? How about a more general-purpose parallel floating-point unit that could be more utilized? Something like the F@H GPU client, but for more apps? As a side effect, it could do graphics.
This, however, is probably wishful thinking. Oh well...
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
...that Brigadier General Jack O'Neil will be back?
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
Boo... I thought you meant SG1. (I'm a nerd)
the word is throes
So, speaking as a former SGI Employee (and stockholder). Are my worthless shares still worthless? I used all my shares as tax-write off years ago and prompt forgot about them.
They did a great job pissing away my 5000 share stake at $25 a share. I was writing that off for five full years and the stock is still worthless. I think from what my accountant said their old shares are offically not worth anything and are just empty bits on a brokerage account somewhere.
Thanks for the fuckover, sgi.
That most of our parents were married before we were born...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Namely, concentrate on the open-source market. Contract with NEC to build a cheap ARM processor on a really old technology using 0.8 micron. Then, build a nice computer around the ARM processor. Use electronic parts that are based on old technology. All the ICs should be 0.8 micron or larger. You can get 0.8-micron chips from China for dirt-cheap prices.
You can probably build a computer for $100 or less. Tune the computer for Linux. Rename the company to International Mozilla Hardware (IMH). Establish the company as a non-profit corporation, not non-profit charity.
There is a huge market for 2nd-tier computers. That market consists of the American underclasses and most of the 3rd world: Mexico, etc. The last laugh will be on people who paid big bucks for 1st-tier computers: the power of a 2nd-tier computer is more than adequate for the #1 Internet application: e-mail.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
If this "death throes" estimate was coming from Dick Cheney, I'd say SGI should have nooooooo problem.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Sadly, this new announcement doesn't mean much for the 'old' SGI.
MIPS is gone.
IRIX is gone.
SGI is gone.
SGI has become another company that will create big commodity Linux boxes. Yeah, there's some cool technology behind it, courtesy of Cray (eventually you can track it back to them), but the things that made SGI special aren't there anymore.
Pity. Oh well, I wish 'em all the best.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Otherwise, how would the Robinsons get off of this rock?
Uh, yer history is wrong. all wrong. DEC never got the cash.
Intel contacted their "buddy" Compaq to buyout DEC, and shutdown the lawsuit.
Poof goes DEC and everything else, and all of Intels troubles soon vanish.
Now that HP owns Compaq, all this old history will never be known by anyone, except for a few that were there.
Intel did what Microsoft always does, and gets away with it, Microsoft still gets away with it.
Thanks to Intel stealing DEC's secrets, they aren't lagging much behind AMD, though AMD still does 64bit a lot better.
You got me all excited about Stargate coming back in the time it took the article to load. Damn you for supplying me with false hope!
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD
We met with the SGI salesmen the other week. They confirmed the following:
1) IRIX is dead (SuSE will be used instead)
2) MIPS is dead (high end chips are itanium)
3) SGI graphics products are dead (go buy ATI)
If you're an idiot or a government contracter, they will still specially-engineer such systems for an obscene amount of money (technically, none of these are dead if you are the government with a service contract).
The new SGI will be selling fancy Itanium systems on the high end and basic Woodcrests linux clusters on the low end.
SGI still has extensive experience and knowledge building high-processor count boxes that act as a single system image. They're one of the only players who will sell you an entire rack of nice Itanium systems - oodles of processors, RAM, and ultra-large bandwidth - packaged nicely. If a multi-threaded application requiring > 100 GB of RAM is your bread and butter, they're still here for you. They also will integrate FPGAs directly on the same interconnect as your processor - not even IBM is doing that for general customers yet.
If they are to survive, it's working with these fancy uber-fast, uber-bandwidth interconnects between processors that allow large NUMA computers and having first-mover advantage with Itaniums and FPGAs on a none PCIe/PCI-X bus.
The only software they will be doing is anything directly related to getting these goals accomplished. No more compilers, debuggers, graphics software, OS, or (probably not) file systems for them. XFS will be maintained (and added to by the community, of course), but don't expect SGI-funded XFS2 to appear any time soon.
Overall, they've done a damn good job of cutting the fat and coming up with a roadplan for the future. The only downside is the fact they've put so much money into the Itanium that the company would sink if Intel cut the cord.
I know it's kinda lame, but I loved their cases. They could make a killing with those things now.
SGI still has some really slick tech like NUMA. I work in high-end visualization, and I can tell you that it's tough to get good computers for it. I'd love to see them start combining commodity and proprietary to make new-wave supercomputer hybrids for visualization. The problem is, that like all Unix makers, they think it's better to do everything themselves and lock-in their customers rather than competing. Get over this and they might have something.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Such as the lead chip designer for the Alpha, Dan Dobberpuhl. A few others are also listed at http://www.pasemi.com/about/team.html
The PWRficient family of PPC processors is actually very interesting from a HPC standpoint; it may even be of some use to SGI. These chips are fast, extremely low power, and have a ton of integrated I/O and memory bandwidth. They are the perfect chip for an extremely high density Blue Gene style system. (Among many other things.)
In any case, the demise of the Alpha was truly a shame. As for SGI, I believe that their fate was sealed when they changed their name and logo. To discard such a logo is unforgivable; if they were to restore it though, perhaps they may rise again...
You can still get Indy et all cases at computer swap meets for around 50 bucks. Unfortunately, they come with some useless chips and circuit boards inside that you'll have to remove.
The ______ Agenda
Go and have a look here if you haven't already. There's some great stuff.
XFS is an awesome filesystem, and has been ranked the overall best in at least two fs benchmarks:- here, and here. Given what I've read here, I'm possibly considering making it my own default fs...at least for some things.
There's also some OpenGL related projects, as well as some kernel work. What this could also mean for them is that even if they do have to sell SUSE clusters, they can still have some individuality in the offering. Sure, anyone can burn xfsprogs to a CD...but SGI can still market themselves as the people who invented the fs, and thus the people who are most intimate with the code, and thus who can possibly most quickly/easily extend it, or fix it if something breaks.
I for one welcome our grunting overlords!
Maybe if SGI can survive a while longer... maybe they will have the only operating system around that will properly take advantage of new AMD and Intel ( lots-of-core ) chips, and arrays thereof. Seriously, what are you gonna do with an 80 core chip ? Run windows ? :)
Uh, yer history is wrong. all wrong. DEC never got the cash. Intel contacted their "buddy" Compaq to buyout DEC, and shutdown the lawsuit. Poof goes DEC and everything else, and all of Intels troubles soon vanish.
If I was going to post a lot of rubbish like that, I'd do it under AC, also. I'm assuming this is actually a troll, but I'll bite anyway. The suit concluded, out of court long before Compaq entered the scene. There was no judgement to go poof and Compaq would be absolute fools to let, IIRC 425 million $ go away, not and keep their executives anyway, no board would buy a company and forgive a large settlement like that.
Intel went on to manufacturer later Alphas under their agreement with DEC before they closed down the fab.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Apparently this story wasn't interesting enough the day it happened (day I reported it), but 2 days later, it's news.
My friends mother used to be a VP at Cray before they merged with SGI. A large portion of the Cray management realized how inept the SGI people were when they got bought, and jumped ship after not too long. It came as no suprise to her when they did a poor job of doing much of anything with Cray & Tera Computer Company bought it off SGI in 2000.
For an example of the idiocy SGI had, they decided in the early/mid 90's to put in CAT 3 because it was slightly cheaper than CAT 5, only to realize about 2 years later they really did need CAT 5 & had to rip out all of the CAT 3 & replace it.
Keep in mind at that point CAT 3 really wasnt much cheaper & it was pretty obvious it would be obsolete pretty quickly.
Unless they really cleaned house & got a lot of new blod in there, SGI's gonna go down again.
They're also really cramped for anything that needs airflow. It can be done, but I wouldn't want to. I'd like ot try watercooling a microATX build in an O2. I think that'd be sweet. I've always loved the O2 cases.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
and actually push an architecture with a future (aka not IA-64).
There is a reason why they choose this one instead.
Next time go to digg. Any moron can post anything there and if they have enough buddies on irc they can get it posted.
I second that! Civilization (not Sid Meier's) is heading down the wrong tracks. Why, in my day, we learned how to spell and how to type and prooofread and about grammar structure and proper use of punctuation and how to really communicate. We didn't have text messaging and camera-phones, IMs, or fancy $300 shoes. We wrote elegant letters and gave them to the friendly postman, and our shoes were made of wood and only came in one size. But we didn't care! We waited weeks to hear back from our friends in exotic and distant lands, like Chicago, or the next county, and at the end of the day our feet were bloody stumps. We didn't know any better, and we loved it.
got2go +1 iz on my lawn lol (I am "Laughing OnLine", if your are Matt Drudge) cya
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Few days ago I saw a piece of news in futuretech.blinkenlights.nl which showed loads of Tezros, Fuels, Octanes and other system on their way to be recycled. Brand-new gear, still in their boxes on their way to be destroyed. Maybe they are not competetive anymore in the price-performance arena, but they are still very very cool machines. Was their destruction really the best option here?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
What I want is for them to design hardware. I don't care about Irix, I don't care about MIPs. I care about how beautifully systems like the O2 came apart and could be put together again. I've yet to see any PC, Apple included, that was so well put together. We need to get past clunky systems with tangles of wires everywhere to get to properly integrated components.
Misread, thought this was a reprieve for Stargate SG1 story.
Must surf after i wake up properly
Actually, the Mac IIci went together very well. That was a vertical-assembly machine; everything went in with a straight-down move. Including the power supply, which was just pushed in vertically, and engaged alignment guides on the case and connectors on the motherboard.
Then Apple offshored manufacturing, and design for automated assembly mattered less.
The problem is this; not the idea of providing an integrated solution; IBM, SUN and HP prove that you can do it quite profitably; the problem with SGI is that they kept thinking they could sell $14000 desktops which barely competed with $5000 intel based workstations.
The first hits came from SUN in the form of their 'low end' workstations, coupled that with software moving to alternative platforms outside SGI, SGI was stuck in a situation where they chose to stick to their guns rather than standing back, looking at the bigger picture and realising that they either have to massively cut prices, and relying on volumes to boost profits off the smaller margins, and make up the rest by pushing their software and services.
Also, their software were a rip-off, NZ$25,000 for a C/C++ compiler? what the hell is SGI smoking? IBM and Sun NEVER charged that amount, and provided superior and faster hardware than SGI did; if it were anything, it was stupidity that killed it.
That's what I would do if I had mod points...
There's no "conflict" in this submission. If it was titled "SGI in position to overthrow ATI/NVIDIA", Zonk would have posted it about 30 seconds after you hit "submit". Hell, Zonk would post an article with nothing but links to goatse if it was titled "After Recent Experiments, Scientists Agree: Coke > Pepsi". Go ahead, try it -- he doesn't read the articles he links to, so he sure as hell doesn't read AC comments in "boring" stories.
Come to think of it, Zonk is probably busy stirring up shit with AC posts right now. I have a theory that he's responsible for a double-digit percentage of all AC trolls (which means there's a good chance I'm replying to one right now).
and Chapter 9 is Bankruptcy. See for example http://www.uscourts.gov/bankruptcycourts/bankruptc ybasics/chapter11.html and http://www.uscourts.gov/bankruptcycourts/bankruptc ybasics/chapter9.html.
Sorry, I could not resist:
)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story
"Good news, everyone!"
It's odd that the only people I know trying the same thing (Castle Technology's Iyonix) charge £600 (about $1100) mostly because of their cost overheads selling only to the UK. They're also the zombie of Acorn Computers.
BTW: I'd suggest the name be International Mozilla Hardware Operation. IMHO.
Maybe SGi should also focus on gfx again, maybe teaming up with nvidia, building high-quality, high-speed cards with excellent Linux/Windows driver support and also Linux applications focussing on GFX stuff. The people who are using those apps don't care if it's not Windows.
I have some wonderful SGI O2 machines that I bought cheap, but they didn't come with IRIX media. I've tried the mips-debian port and quite frankly it's disappointing, although I can't blame the mips-debian people since they don't have specs for the hardware. I've tried to find out how to buy a copy of IRIX from SGI and I haven't figured it out. How do I, without having to buy a fifty million dollar service contract for my old machines?
Why doesn't google buy SGI? (idea)
From the looks of things the business model has been shifted out of the graphics market and into the server market. Probably explains why there is no silicon graphics in SGI anymore... From there site:
"Expanding Focus: Enterprise Data Management
As it redoubles its focus on solving problems for customers in its core technical markets, the new SGI business model - and its expanded potential within new and existing customer organizations - is built in part around solutions that help enterprises address the data explosion underway within companies worldwide."
The CAD department where I work has an Octane sitting forgotten in a corner (because we "upgraded" to XP machines). It's been here longer than I have, I would say it's around 8 years old. Probably cost a good penny in it's time... I'd like to find a use for it. It's about the right size for a footrest, that's all I've come up with so far! Anyone want to build an Octane array?? LOL
I love Stargate! I hope O'Neil comes back.
Former US House candidate, TN-5
.. than my current Powerbook. But SGI never made one. They wussed out and decided it was 'too hard' to make decent computers that the rest of humanity outside the big-metal bubble could use.
..
Pity, it would've been fun to use to chase storms
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
sgi created IRIS GL and later released it as OpenGL. I would say OpenGL is pretty significant as far as graphics are concerned.
Microsoft and nVIDIA bought numerous graphics patents from sgi in the mid through late 90's. These purchased OpenGL patents and technologies contributed greatly to production of Direct3D and nVIDIA's success.
There is also a large consesus that ATi would not even be in the same realm as nVIDIA if not for their purchase of ArtX. ArtX was a company founded by ex-sgi employees. ATi purchased ArtX a short time after ArtX created the Nintendo 64's graphics system.
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
We still love you.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The problem with Prism isn't that it's expensive.
The problem is that they're extremely slow where your app isn't multithreaded (some algorithms just aren't multithreadable) as the Itanium is just dog slow. Also, despite the high memory, the limitation of inferior (at the time) ATI graphics cards on a non-PCI-express bus didn't help either. So you could have a massive ammount of data in memory, but once you tried to display it, it was slower than on a Sun/IBM/HP opteron box. Lastly, one single byte of data failing within the box causes very fun/hard to debug problem and is not uncommon.
At least the Prisms run a modified version of Redhat (and not Irix). And yes, they've let everyone in the Prism group go except some people for support as far as I'm aware. Long live SGI, the uh...disk storage solution.
(Posted as AC for my own protection;))
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
The whole story sounds like an episode of ATHF. The ghost of Christmas past from the future shows up, and claims that SGI is back from Chapter 11.
Frylock gets excited, but ultimately SGI destroys Carl's car.
I had a discussion with some colleagues yesterday at the launch of our latest Dell/Xeon-based cluster, Lonestar. I explained that I was concerned how little development was going into TRUE supercomputers, not simply supercomputing clusters. Single-image, large ccNUMA systems are rare. But they're still needed for "non-chunkable" processes. OK, so only a few people need them, whereas Googles and the like can benefit from highly parallel cluster technologies, I still hope there remains the kind of brilliant engineering we saw in the '90s. Craylink, for example, was like magic, and Hypertransport (on Opteron and others) borrows a lot from those sorts of designs.
:)
The best thing SGI had was excellent software frameworks. The MP libraries, GRIO and other technologies were great. IRIS/OpenGL is legendary. Running on top of then state-of-the-art hardware was what made SGI magical. I hope they can bring that back.
Maybe I should look for a firesale FUEL too
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
After them dropping my stocks with no compensation, why in the hell would I be willing to buy their stocks again? As far as I am concerned, I was a loyal supporter and they royally screwed me over. Screw SGI.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Ultra 64 was an incredible product, and left SGI with two growth options:
Growth option 1: utilizethe incredibly cheap hardware to get SGI into the mainstream market. It had all the features of a high-end SGI workstation for $200. All you had to add was more ram, a disk and a monitor, and you could build a mass-market machine for under $1500. They could have beaten Sun into the ground, and even give the Pentium Pro a run for its money with beefy graphics workstations at around 3-4k. But no, SGI sat idly by and let Sun, NT, consumer 3D companies and (most importantly) the Pentium Pro take root, letting themselves get slaughtered.
Growth option 2: even if SGI wasn't motivated enough to expand into the mainstream workstation market, they could have leveraged all that time put into Ultra 64. After SGI did such a great job, Nintendo came looking for a design partner for their next-generation console, and got turned away. SGI decided to concentrate on their core business, and left Nintendo standing there.
SGI missed two distinct chances to grow their market, so I have no sympathy.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Sell us some more locks, will you?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks