SGI Lives On, In Name At Least

Hugh Pickens writes "In a surprise corporate move, after Rackable Systems received bankruptcy court approval on April 30 to close its purchase of SGI, the company announced on Monday that the deal had closed and that the combined company would be called SGI — short for Silicon Graphics International instead of the original Silicon Graphics Inc. The revival of the SGI brand will certainly please people in Silicon Valley with a historical bent, as SGI has been one of the area's true icons. However, some consider this a curious turn of events, considering that Rackable has come to represent the new guard in the server market, while SGI has struggled for years. Executives hope the name change will help it expand its business overseas, where SGI is a better-known brand. The new SGI will also continue to develop and support the high-performance computing systems that Silicon Graphics was known for, says Rackable's president and CEO. 'There should be no disruption to Silicon Graphics customers.'"

Comments

Re:Didn't Caldera do something similar with SCO?

[A12m0v]

let's hope they embrace Linux and opensource IRIX.

Re:Didn't Caldera do something similar with SCO?

[bsdaemonaut]

They've pretty much already done this. The last major release of IRIX was in 1998. They stopped selling MIPS IRIX in 2006 and end-of-life for MIPS IRIX is 2013. Though they specifically state MIPS IRIX I can't find any mention of continuing versions based on other architectures. Not to mention, very few people wanted to run IRIX outside of SGI systems. So in effect, IRIX is currently stagnant beyond minor patches and will soon be completely dropped. They do, on the other hand, offer linux on all their new systems and have been doing so for years. They make some claims as to have "given back" to the linux community but I'm not sure how true that is. I doubt they'll ever opensource IRIX, it's a dinosaur and very likely it would die out as quickly as OpenDarwin. There is barely room for new opensource operating systems out there, much less ones that haven't been significantly updated in 10 years.

If only ...

[lucag]

Compaq had changed its name to Digital when it still had time ...

[just being nostalgic and wondering who had the "bright" idea to dump development of the Alpha line in favour of ia64 ! ]

Re:If only ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously 'cos I was involved.

The killing of the Alpha was a rather long and tortured affair. It also was a really sad day when the people who made the decision had to accept that their architecture was dead.

Let's be honest here, I loved the Alpha and it was a phenomenal architecture for its time. However, by 1998 its time was actually ending anyway. Realistically, other CPU architectures like MIPS were chomping at our heels in our opinion. They were rapidly catching up with us in terms of performance for the cost of the CPU fabbing (note that I said cost, not retail price).

We had started work on a next generation architecture shortly before Compaq came in, but we never could quite get the performance out of it that we felt we needed to keep ahead of the next generation of competitor's CPU's. We wanted to define a 5 year architecture; one that could scale rapidly in performance while keeping our development costs relatively low... but as we started to work on it we realized already that it was going to be really hard to create even a 3 year architecture, let alone 5.

By the time Compaq came in, there was already rumbling in the halls that Alpha was in trouble... this wasn't news to anyone. As a result, when Compaq did arrive and told us their plans we basically had only one realistic choice; shutter the Alpha division.

If we'd moved ahead with the next gen architecture, it would've been the Alpha equivalent of a Pentium 4; kludged to improve clock speed at the expense of creating an architecture that was fundamentally a dead end at day 1. Intel could soak this up because of volume... DEC never had a chance. We didn't sell that kind of volume, ever... and we didn't have the marketing muscle to catch up. As a result, we couldn't create an "Alpha IV"... it would've killed us anyway.

In the opinion of those who were present at the meetings when the future direction was set, Alpha wasn't killed, rather it was euthanized. It was better to go out in a blaze of glory than to fade into irrelevance.

On the bright side, many of the engineers I used to work with now have great jobs that they love... some working for Intel, but many working in what they love; small boutique CPU's and embedded systems.

Re:State of IRIX?

[rackserverdeals]

The best thing SGI ever sold though (back in 1997) ran Solaris. Too bad they didn't realize what they were selling.

Re:BRING BACK THE CHROME CUBE LOGO

[Ethanol-fueled]

Ugh, those damn things were ugly. They may have been built like tanks, but taking one apart was like trying to solve a Rubik's cube. (an angled case fan?!) One has to be extra careful when pulling out the graphics card because it was easy to catch its cap on the frame and rip it right off!

The Oxygen and O2 were far more elegant designs. I wished that regular PCs had that kind of setup (the CPU and boards were covered with massive heatsinks but no dedicated fans, but the chassis had two huge master fans keeping the whole thing cool). And all SGI machines were very picky about their hardware. Sometimes solving a hanging boot meant changing the DIMMS around.

Re:Didn't Caldera do something similar with SCO?

[AKAImBatman]

Reminds me of Cingular purchasing AT&T, then rebranding as AT&T. Cingular had a lot of goodwill for its excellent pricing, good coverage, and top notch service*. AT&T was seen as a dinosaur that was stuck in the past. They offered lousy pricing, terrible coverage, and some of the worst service in the industry.

Result? Cingular took all their goodwill and flushed it down the toilet in exchange for a brand name that no one wanted to have as their carrier. Even worse, their service took a nosedive after the merger, leading to a LOT of irate customers. Absolutely brilliant. :-/

* For a cellular company, anyway. We have to speak in relative terms here. :-P