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SGI Arises From the Ashes

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the back-in-the-saddle dept.

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.

13 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Arise! Arise! by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Arise! Arise! by PsychicX · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Arise! Arise! by Profane+MuthaFucka · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
    3. Re:Arise! Arise! by stox · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
    4. Re:Arise! Arise! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Re:Is this entire site populated by illiterates? by setirw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  3. DEC Alpha engineers at AMD. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:DEC Alpha engineers at AMD. by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  4. Re:Is this entire site populated by illiterates? by vox_soli · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  5. no, he actually meant "throws" by User+956 · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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.
  6. Re:The days of one-off systems is pretty much dead by BrewerDude · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. SGI-lite by bockelboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. Some at P.A.Semi as well... by KonoWatakushi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...