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.

Is this entire site populated by illiterates?

[vox_soli]

Sheesh. That should be 'death throes'.

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: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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Now that HP owns Compaq, all this old history will never be known by anyone, except for a few that were there.

Intel did what Microsoft always does, and gets away with it, Microsoft still gets away with it.

Thanks to Intel stealing DEC's secrets, they aren't lagging much behind AMD, though AMD still does 64bit a lot better.

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: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.

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.

Re:SGI-lite

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

...

The new SGI will be selling fancy Itanium systems on the high end ...

Uh oh. Did they ever benchmark those fancy Itanium systems? If there's something that should be dead ...

Re:SGI appears to be out of the graphics business

[StonedYoda47]

That's why you go into Chapter 11, in order to get relief from creditors. Without looking at financials or court documents nearly all their secured and unsecured debt should be gone. Of course, so are the employees and alot of their assets to pay for this.

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.

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.

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.

Re:Arise! Arise!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bzzzt yourself. The GP post is on the money. As companies, ATI and nVidia predate the collapse of SGI but their rise to the top of the graphics industry was directly aided by the influx of SGI talent. In 1997 a bunch of top SGI graphics engineers left to form ArtX to do the next-gen Nintendo (GameCube). They were acquired by ATI in Feb. 2000. Dave Orton, a VP and GM at SGI then President of ArtX is now president and CEO of ATI. nVidia benefited more organically. I know a bunch of former SGI people that landed there starting in 1997. They've risen through the ranks. One is now a VP of GPU Engineering.

It's sad to think about how SGI could have re-invented itself and could be in the position of ATI and/or nVidia today. But I think it's hard for an established company to re-invent itself and turn around. Sometimes it's easier (and more lucrative) if the engineers just bolt and start something new.

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.

Chapter 11 is Reorganization, not Bankruptcy

[Anonymous Coward]

and Chapter 9 is Bankruptcy. See for example http://www.uscourts.gov/bankruptcycourts/bankruptc ybasics/chapter11.html [uscourts.gov] and http://www.uscourts.gov/bankruptcycourts/bankruptc ybasics/chapter9.html [uscourts.gov].