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Rackable Buying SGI Assets For $25M?
UnanimousCoward was one of many people to submit a story that might be an April Fools day joke, except that I don't think it is. Rackable Systems has announced that it is buying SGI for the bargain basement price of $25M. Time was that there was little cooler than an SGI workstation. And note to Rackable's PR: Either this was a genius joke, or a terrible day to announce huge news. Someone either deserves a promotion or a firing.
a story that might be an April Fools day joke
Hey I myself enjoy taking a joke too far but if this is an April Fool's Day joke, I must confess I would have jumped out and yelled "surprise" before filing a merger and acquisition notice with the Security and Exchange Commission of the United States Government. I hear they don't take too kindly to joke 8-Ks.
From the SEC Filing:
On April 1, 2009, Rackable Systems, Inc. ("Rackable"), a Delaware corporation, announced that it had signed an Asset Purchase Agreement (the "Agreement") to acquire substantially all the assets of Silicon Graphics, Inc., a Delaware corporation ("SGI"), including SGI's non-U.S. subsidiaries and operations, other than certain assets unrelated to the ongoing business. The Agreement, dated March 31, 2009, was made and entered into by and among Rackable, SGI and certain SGI subsidiaries. The Agreement has been approved by the respective boards of directors of Rackable and SGI.
Under the terms of the Agreement, Rackable or a subsidiary of Rackable, will acquire the assets for a purchase price of approximately $25 million in cash, $10 million of which will be placed in escrow and available to Rackable following the closing to reimburse Rackable for payments and expenses made or incurred in connection with certain tax matters. In addition, Rackable will assume certain liabilities associated with the acquired assets. Following the signing of the Agreement, SGI and certain of its affiliated entities located in the U.S. filed a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition and motions to approve the Agreement.
Also note that they had planned to repurchase up to $40 million worth of shares but it looks like instead they're opting to acquire SGI. What that means to you day traders and quant fund managers, who knows?
And note to Rackable's PR: Either this was a genius joke, or a terrible day to announce huge news. Someone either deserves a promotion or a firing.
The world doesn't screech to a halt because a bunch of nerds are slapping their knees and pulling pranks; here's evidence someone got something done yesterday.
My work here is dung.
Or if it is, the Alternative Press, Reuters, and Wall Street Journal are all in on it.
Not that I didn't preview or anything, but I could have also linked in the SGI customer letter. Rackable is getting SGI without getting their debt.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You have parsed the sentance correctly. The construction is an idiomatic one, typically used by older folks looking back on how times have changed or younger folks affecting a similar attitude.
BTW. I hear you can pick up killer SGI MIPS equipment on eBay for a song. These machines are still workhorses for 3D rendering, audio and video production.
These machines suck down the power like motherfuckers by today's standards. You can get more power in a refurb laptop. Mine allegedly costs around $1200 that way and has a Quadro 2700M 512MB with absolutely absurd memory bandwidth... the machine itself has T9400, 2GB exp. to 4GB, 250GB 7200RPM, DVD+/-R/W w/LS, 1680x1050 17", VGA+HDMI, 24bit/96khz audio, super pissed off ricoh SD/etc reader... How much will you pay for electricity in the summer months? I can run my system on one of those harbor freight solar panel setups and a $20 inverter (Thanks for the heads up Lumpy.)
Please, people, I know the love of antique hackery but let those systems die. They aren't going to save you anything in the long run. Speaking as someone who has owned SGI machines, VME suns, an Alphastation, and whole herds of Apollo DN-series and IBM RT-series machines, let them go on to that great goodnight at the recycler. As it is I still have an Indy R4400SC with a marginal power supply (or something) and a camera cluttering up my storage area. Even that thing draws more than my laptop. Food for thought.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The nix part was ok, IIRC it was the god awful GUI implementation that really let it down. The hardware was awesome for apps like Maya/Softimage etc, however you had to learn ways of working that avoided the GUI entirely. Oh, and re-installing irix was as simple as constructing an atomic bomb in your garden shed, from 2 paperclips, some woodglue, and a dead panda, whilst your arms are tied behind your back. Actually. Now i think about it. You're right, .... irix was shit.
Even now, Maya still has some legacy hangovers from those days: Ctrl+Space to remove the GUI. Ctrl+M to remove the menus. Space to bring up the 'hotbox', which is basically a menu rendered using openGL (about the only thing Sgi's could do really well).
Even now, I'm still staggered by how far Sgi managed to fall from grace. Mind you, i think Apple learnt a lot from SGI about how to switch to Intel processors successfully. The way SGI did it made every single one of their existing clients run to the hills, and they never looked back.
It doesn't sound like Rackable is paying much for SGI's assets; but, they are picking up SGI's considerable debt, several hundred million dollars, in the deal. So, the up front $25 million cash is only a small part of the total "cost" of the transaction.
My O2 is running OpenBSD, now. Too bad I can't get the latest versions of IRIX. It was pretty impressive what that little O2 could do.
My Octane does a pretty good job of holding the carpet down.
Depends on what you mean by the GUI. Their X implementation had a lot of neat features; they were doing accelerated indirect OpenGL over a decade before X.org/XFree86 managed it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
How old are you, where did you learn to speak English, and is it your native language?
Serious questions - I found the sentence mostly unexceptional (I'd probably have left out "that"), and I'm curious about the difficulty you had in parsing it.
IBM learned long ago the money is in selling support contracts. None of the other vendors ever seemed to really grasp that idea.
Actually, it's a lesson that HP has learned also (witness their growing services arm).
*sigh* back to work...
oh no, HP is not alive because of their crappy Unixes, imaging and printing and networkig is practically carrying the company. In fact, the turd that is HP's Itanic er Itanium2 processor helped bring down sgi and
HP? They're not alive because of people using HP-UX, they're alive because HP-UX is a trivial part of their business. They make laptops and printers, and that (especially the printers) is why they're alive.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Yeah, a couple of years ago I was astonished to find that an Octane has actually a 747W power supply. It was introduced in the late 90s, when PC desktops had like 200W boxes.
This is why SGI finally fell apart; you guys are all talking about SGI workstations. SGI hasn't been in the workstation business for years. There hasn't been a workstation business for years. HP,IBM,Sun sell workstations, but they are just rebranded PCs. Dec,DG,EnS,Intergraph,Appalo: all defunct.
Lately SGI has been selling low-end HPC clusters and a few mid-range altix machines. (and one really big one at nasa) The HPC business is a really difficult place to make money. SGI has never been good at keeping their operating costs down. Compared to their competition, they always seemed to employ a lot of people, and have a lot of irons in the fire, most of which never panned out.
SGI has always loved to engineer their way around problems; In a mature market one makes money by engineering a solution to a problem and then licensing it out to the rest of the world until it becomes an industry standard. Numalink could have been what infiniband is now. Infinitereality could have been what geforce is now. CXFS could have been what lustre is. XIO could be PCIe. SGI wanted to control it though. They tried to keep it all under the tent.
I wouldn't knock X too much - X was designed for a different audience than other windowing systems - specifically, it was designed for the model where an expensive server sits in one location and lots of cheap terminals lie around and connect to that server. It is actually a good design for what it was intended for. The problem is, almost nobody uses setups like that these days (though it's coming back... see OnLive), and it also lacked a number of "essential" features like security since the devs made the assumption that the network was secure so these were tacked on.
I loved IRIX in the early 1990s, but when cheap consumer graphics hardware became available I saw their days were numbered unless they entered that market and they didn't. They did try to diversify, but it was scattershot and some moves I felt were in the wrong direction - like buying supercomputing company Cray Research, so I could see the end coming from there (though working with a bunch of ex-SGI people and hearing about mis-management made me think it was coming much sooner than it did).
We have a couple of SGI machines and the real value add of having SGI is the support.
Some hardware breaks, and unless it needs to be shipped from the US it is fixed within hours.
Some software breaks, and you get a full diagnosis on what the problem was and options to choose from on how you'd like to fix it.
Some researcher has code that runs like a dog, they'll tune and parallelise it for the appropriate system.
I hope our local guys are fine with this news. They are worth their weights in gold. I can't say that about any other hardware vendor.
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