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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
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.
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
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...
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.