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.

Comments

Arise! Arise!

[ackthpt]

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.)

Re:Arise! Arise!

[PsychicX]

It's interesting to note that NVIDIA and ATI were both created by people who realized how utterly braindead the SGI management was and walked out before the titantic sank. So in some sense, these people are the leftovers, the ones who screwed up and never realized it.

Can an old dog of a megacorp learn new tricks? We'll find out, I guess. A new competitor in the consumer GPU industry would certainly be appreciated.

Re:Arise! Arise!

[Frumious Wombat]

Wierdly enough, if you drill hard enough you'll find their "Prism" system, which looks like the old Immersadesk, augmented by Reality Walls and Cave-type environments. OTOH, they won't tell you what it's running on, and the two Irix workstations still in the line-up are marked "EOL Dec 2006".

Therefore, they're going to compete in HPC with Itanium and Opteron systems, which seems to be a recipe for getting crushed by the Terra/Cray hybrid (under Cray's name), HP and their Itanium servers through SuperDrome systems, and IBM/Sun on the smaller Opteron boxes. Add to this that they've fired to many engineers, this has to be a delaying action before the real end: six guys running a consulting company out of a Mountain-View garage.

They really are a case of, "time to sell whatever assets are left, return the proceeds to the stockholders, and say, "it was fun"". However, since they just came out of bankruptcy, the stock is probably worth less than nothing, so time to sell whatever assets are left, order a pizza and six-pack of cheap beer with the proceeds, then turn out the lights.

Re:Arise! Arise!

[stox]

Bzzzzt! Wrong, please play again. SGI was only founded three years before ATI, 1982 and 1985 respectively. Nvidia was founded in 1993. None of the founders of these companies had anything to do with SGI. Two of the three Nvidia founders were from SUN, and the third AMD.

Re:Arise! Arise!

[Profane MuthaFucka]

If your first name is Ken, I met you on a bus travelling from Baltimore to Washington D.C. about 12 years ago. You whipped out your laptop and booted up Linux. And you bitched about not being able to smoke on the bus. Small world. Folks, this dude was on the Internet way back in 1982 or earlier. I'm a relative young'in, only on the net since 1988.

Re:Arise! Arise!

[stox]

Wow! I guess I wasn't low profile enough, even back then. ;-> That would have been the bus between BWI and the Convention Center, 11 years ago. Boy, that was one hell of a trip. My flight was late, and I needed to setup the booth for Fermilab at the Supercomputing 1995 conference. I still have my Cray IV poster, signed by Seymour. When I got there, the convention center staff still had not unloaded and delivered our crates. We quickly figured out which members of the staff to bribe and get our stuff before the convention actually started. Corrupt little bunch over there, but being from Chicago, I was used to it.

I managed to make strange, though obvious, contribution to the rise of the Internet at that convention. At the time, nobody was putting their web address on business cards. After the first day, my writing hand was exhausted from scribbling our web address on pieces of paper. The next day, I ran out to a print shop and had a few hundred cards printed up with our web address. The day after that, a few of the commercial exhibitors did the same. I'll probably burn in hell for that idea.

Drop a note, my email address is visible.

Re:Arise! Arise!

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, they EOP'd the Prism deskside in June 06 (it was IA64-Linux); their 'cheap' system was $7K (ridiculous.) The larger Prism systems were interesting- they were basicially a large Altix with graphics pipes strapped on; but was a solution in search of a problem. How many people need to visualize a half-terabyte of data from RAM? The demo they liked to show at trade shows was to visualize every part of a Boeing 777 (down to each rivet) in real time. It didn't wow you because you can't see every rivet (even at 10Kx10K), and it wasn't textured. If you need to explain with more than 3 words why your demo is awesome, then your demo isn't awesome.

The Altix is better in just about every category than the SuperDromes (price, performance, units shipped, IO, scalability, etc.). The nice thing about the Altix versus the Tera/Cray system is that code written by Joe Researcher on his 2P Linux desktop machine will run on 2048P Altix w/ just a recompile. While IBM's Blue Gene & Red Storm are 'linux-based', developing for the platform is nontrivial. Of course, if you're dropping $50M, you could probably swing a few dollars for some experts to optimize for that platform. They also got screwed by the Intel's Montecito delay.

SGI isn't selling Opteron clusters (They have a 'special' relationship with Intel.) They are selling Xeon clusters (commodity currently, coming out with more special sauce platforms). It's probably too late. If they came out with clusters in '99 - '01 when there were a significant SGI user-base that would pay a premium for their tools and environment, they could have captured a good share of that market.

Going Chapter-11 freed up cash. They aren't going to compete in graphics, but they have enough interesting hardware and low expenses to carve out a niche market. The ex-creditors own much of the new stock.

Is this entire site populated by illiterates?

[vox_soli]

Sheesh. That should be 'death throes'.

Re:Is this entire site populated by illiterates?

[setirw]

Heh... I think the entirety of the Internet is illiterate. Compared to YouTube, Slashdot is actually rather good. If usage patterns on the Internet are indicative of a larger trend, we, as a species, are screwed.

Re:Is this entire site populated by illiterates?

[vox_soli]

It could be worse. In fifty years there probably won't even be text fora like this. Written language will be a lost secret of the mysterious past and it'll all just be morons grunting at each other over webcams.

If SGI is coming back...

[themonkman]

...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.

Re:If SGI is coming back...

[Tiger4]

The Real Beauty of Irix is in its capbilities on the big multiprocessor Onyx systems. It may be slow on the individual and dual processors, but in a 32 or 64 proc array it is truly wonderful. Slow in some ways, but very efficient in resource usage. The fabled Bowulf cluster technologies are good too, but they aren't really a match for ccNUMA as already implemented on IRIX on SGI machines. If you need that kind of power, it is great stuff.

In smaller applications, they are in some trouble, no doubt about it. I don't know if the big stuff is enough business to keep them afloat. The evidence to date is not good.

DEC Alpha engineers at AMD.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:DEC Alpha engineers at AMD.

[ackthpt]

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.

For years I followed the battle between DEC and Intel, over Intel stealing a dozen or so technologies from DEC, which they implemented in the Pentium and Itanic (Merced at the time) DEC waited until Intel was commited to their theft before lowering the boom. Ultimately Intel settled with DEC, gaining access to the patents and having to fork over a very considerable amount of money for DEC's processor fab, which IIRC Intel shut down anyway. Oddly enough, after all this cash poured into DEC they still went bust. I think, too, a lot of the smarter fish left DEC when they saw that ship foundering near the rocks of poor market direction.

Re:DEC Alpha engineers at AMD.

[mihalis]

This is a load of crap. The ideas of superscalar out-of-order processors came from IBM, CDC, Cray, and the academic literature years before either DEC or Intel ever implemented one. Yet when Intel came out with the out-of-order Pentium Pro, all the DEC guys were screaming and hollering.

Who mentioned out-of-order? Digital didn't release an out of order processor until quit a long time after Intel. Intel's Pentium Pro (out-of-order) was about on par with the Alpha 21164 (strictly in order, but clocking very high for its silicon technology). The Alpha 21264 was out-of-order but suffered severe delays and I don't thnk the program EVER recovered. I don't recall Digital staking a claim to originating out-of-order. They did claim to be doing it better with unbeatable low-level circuit designs.

The days of one-off systems is pretty much dead

[postbigbang]

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.

Re:The days of one-off systems is pretty much dead

[BrewerDude]

MIPS processors may be pretty much dead for desktop machines and workstations, but they are very much alive and kicking in the embedded space. For example, take a look at the XLR processor from RMI. This is not your father's MIPS R4000.

no, he actually meant "throws"

[User 956]

"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.

Re:no, he actually meant "throws"

[ackthpt]

No, he was talking about actual "death throws". Like when Steve Ballmer gets ahold of a chair.

There's a new show for prime time ... celebrity cadaver throwing.

Re:no, he actually meant "throws"

[MadUndergrad]

I was thinking more along the lines of that they have to roll a saving throw vs. death. (DC 25)

Re:no, he actually meant "throws"

[StikyPad]

I think he really meant "Death Row's." Dictation software is a biatch.

SGI appears to be out of the graphics business

[techmuse]

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.

Re:SGI appears to be out of the graphics business

[ackthpt]

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.

Wouldn't surprise me, but is it really worth all the money to keep this company going to make commodity hardware and storage systems? Any schmuck could do that without starting out with all that debt.

This would be benificial

[slimjim8094]

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...

Employee

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Employee

[stevesliva]

In Chapter 11, the shareholders are the last creditors in line. Your shares are still and permanently worthless, and whatever banks SGI was indebted to now own the company.

I Think You'll Find

[Greyfox]

That most of our parents were married before we were born...

SGI isn't that kind of business

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Will this reorganization put them back as a player in the graphics game?

Many years ago, SGI stood for Silicon Graphics Inc. But then the company was officially renamed to SGI. Ie. SGI no longer stands for anything, it's just the company name. It signalled a change in business - the 'g' no longer stands for graphics. For example, there is no mention of "Silicon Graphics" here. They do appear to use the name "Silicon Graphics" in the names of some of their graphics products. But there's little reason to think that they have any intention of being a major player in the graphics industry.

SGI-lite

[bockelboy]

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.

Re:SGI-lite

[jandrese]

The MIPSpro compilers were wicked good at optimizing, easily beating the pants off of GCC, but they were very very picky about your code. Compiling random stuff off of the internet with them was challenging, and it was common to have to fix a bunch of little bugs in the code to get it to compile for you. There were times where a programmer decided he loved some technique and decided to use it everywhere, integrating it into the core of his code. In these cases, porting the program was hopeless. I kept both gcc and MIPSpro on my box just for those situations. Using gcc all of the time was a lousy option though, it produced code 20-50% slower on average, even on the most aggressive optimizer settings (which were buggy in their own right). Of course this was back in the gcc 2.95 days, the difference might not be so pronounced these days, especially since new development on MIPSpro has been dead for years.

Some at P.A.Semi as well...

[KonoWatakushi]

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...

They still have their open source projects up

[petrus4]

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.

Re:They still have their open source projects up

[Oddhack]

Those graphics projects are all dead and rotting. There is no graphics engineering left at SGI. All laid off back in March. The only remaining connection between SGI and OpenGL is that they hold the trademark, but the actual standard now evolves within the Khronos organization, primarily through contributions by ATI, NVIDIA, and Intel.

Re:DEC Alpha engineers at AMD- yer a bit confused

[ackthpt]

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.

SGI & cray

[Nyph2]

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.

And the saddest part....

[10Ghz]

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?

What I want...

[Cheetahfeathers]

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.