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.

Re:Is this entire site populated by illiterates?

[setirw]

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.

I wish them the best.

[OrangeTide]

But we all know that SGI is a lost cause, they company would have to basically fire all of its useless upper management and rehire all the smart people that left years ago to survive in this market.

SGI stock is not worth the paper it is printed on. (not that they normally print shares anymore)

Re:Arise! Arise!

[PsychicX]

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.

Re:SGI appears to be out of the graphics business

[ackthpt]

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.

Wouldn't surprise me, but is it really worth all the money to keep this company going to make commodity hardware and storage systems? Any schmuck could do that without starting out with all that debt.

Re:Arise! Arise!

[Frumious Wombat]

Wierdly enough, if you drill hard enough you'll find their "Prism" system, which looks like the old Immersadesk, augmented by Reality Walls and Cave-type environments. OTOH, they won't tell you what it's running on, and the two Irix workstations still in the line-up are marked "EOL Dec 2006".

Therefore, they're going to compete in HPC with Itanium and Opteron systems, which seems to be a recipe for getting crushed by the Terra/Cray hybrid (under Cray's name), HP and their Itanium servers through SuperDrome systems, and IBM/Sun on the smaller Opteron boxes. Add to this that they've fired to many engineers, this has to be a delaying action before the real end: six guys running a consulting company out of a Mountain-View garage.

They really are a case of, "time to sell whatever assets are left, return the proceeds to the stockholders, and say, "it was fun"". However, since they just came out of bankruptcy, the stock is probably worth less than nothing, so time to sell whatever assets are left, order a pizza and six-pack of cheap beer with the proceeds, then turn out the lights.

Re:Is this entire site populated by illiterates?

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is, those of us who know how to spell and punctuate correctly don't need to go through the laborious thought process you've just described. When someone prints the phrase 'death throws' on our screens, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Or a 'soar thum', if you prefer. When you're writing something for publication, it never hurts to just spend a few moments with a dictionary.

SGI isn't that kind of business

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Will this reorganization put them back as a player in the graphics game?

Many years ago, SGI stood for Silicon Graphics Inc. But then the company was officially renamed to SGI. Ie. SGI no longer stands for anything, it's just the company name. It signalled a change in business - the 'g' no longer stands for graphics. For example, there is no mention of "Silicon Graphics" here [sgi.com]. They do appear to use the name "Silicon Graphics" in the names of some of their graphics products. But there's little reason to think that they have any intention of being a major player in the graphics industry.

Re:Is this entire site populated by illiterates?

[setirw]

I see that the person who moderated me as "troll" must be insecure about his own linguistic skills. :)

SGI is still dead

[swordgeek]

Sadly, this new announcement doesn't mean much for the 'old' SGI.

MIPS is gone.
IRIX is gone.
SGI is gone.

SGI has become another company that will create big commodity Linux boxes. Yeah, there's some cool technology behind it, courtesy of Cray (eventually you can track it back to them), but the things that made SGI special aren't there anymore.

Pity. Oh well, I wish 'em all the best.

Re:This would be benificial

[slimjim8094]

How about a physics coprocessor instead of an entire board?

Yeah, there's some cycle describing that, about how specialized coprocessors will handle different tasks (much like GPUs), and then merge back into the general-purpose CPU. However, I'm talking about a gfx card, that also happens to be easily programmable (maybe with some driver-level, standard-among-manufacturers, scripting?) so we can do cool things with a massively parallel floating-point processor.

Maybe now is a good time...

[light_rock]

Maybe if SGI can survive a while longer... maybe they will have the only operating system around that will properly take advantage of new AMD and Intel ( lots-of-core ) chips, and arrays thereof. Seriously, what are you gonna do with an 80 core chip ? Run windows ? :)

Re:This would be benificial

[JPriest]

The problem with that idea is that SGI sold [theregister.co.uk] much of their 3D graphics patents portfolio to Microsoft. Most of their best talent has gone to work at other companies and I am sure they have a great deal of catching up to do in terms of R&D if they again want to be a major player. MIPS and IRIX have fallen behind on R&D as well.

What they do still have is a name, and if their $multi million/year executives are worth the money they make, that will be all they need to get back on the map.