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SGI Files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy

Posted by Hemos on Mon May 08, 2006 07:53 AM
from the yet-again dept.
Silicon Graphics Supercomputing Hardware
audi100quattro writes "The WSJ has a story about SGI filing for bankruptcy, but the SGI Investor's Relation page doesn't say anything." Nothing else really known at this point, but this is not unexpected.
+ -
story

Related Stories

[+] SGI Arises From the Ashes 195 comments
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.
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  • Story (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2006, @07:55AM (#15284532)
    Silicon Graphics Files
    For Chapter 11 Protection
    A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP
    May 8, 2006 6:56 a.m.

    Silicon Graphics Inc., a long-struggling maker of high-performance computers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

    A group of bondholders agreed to trade their debt for a stake in the company, which filed for Chapter 11 protection Monday morning in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan.

    SGI is known for desktop workstations and larger server systems that are favored by engineers and others who demand sophisticated graphics, including Hollywood studios. But the company has suffered a long slide, partly due to competition from machines based on standard components used in personal computers.

    The company's stock was recently delisted from the New York Stock Exchange for trading below a minimum threshold of $1 a share, and now trades on the small-cap OTC Bulletin Board.

    Earlier this year, SGI replaced its top executive amid widening losses and lower revenue. Last month, the company said it expected revenue of about $108 million for the third fiscal quarter, well below guidance of $140 million to $160 million.
    • This is just to get rid of debt and stuff like that. The people who actually own the company believe there's great potential and they seem determined to do all it takes to turn the company around.
      The current management is very different from the old one. It can be argued, and it has been argued before, that it was a succession of management mistakes which brought the company to its current situation. But the old mistakes seem to be a thing of the past now.

      So, good engineering + bad management = financial di

  • Press Release (Score:5, Informative)

    by datafr0g (831498) * <datafrog AT gmail DOT com> on Monday May 08 2006, @07:55AM (#15284533) Homepage
    SGI's press release here: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060508/sfm098.html?.v= 45 [yahoo.com]

    • Re:The death of SGI (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ekimminau (775300) on Monday May 08 2006, @08:26AM (#15284705) Homepage Journal
      SGI began its rapid decline the moment the announced the merger with Cray. As the stodgy crew of maanagers went on the land grab trying to justify their existence in their "new " company, it drove out many of the long hair, fast and loose crowd of exceptional engineers who believed SGI was a magical place.

      SGI truly was a magical place to be. Not only the "Its Not just a job, Its a wardrobe" pens, frisbees, t-shirts for every new product, boxer shorts, key chains, and all the other swag SGI marketing was famous for. The "O" series of products, led by the Indigo2 Max-Impact were revolutionary products. Massively fast backplanes that still exceed the performance of all but a limite few systems, incredibly fast graphics sub systems with fill rates that still can't be achieved on lowly PC gear (they just can't push the bits fast enough).

      In addition, SGI truly owned the internet space, well before Sun and then gave it away once Sun started the "dot in dot.com" marketing campaign. They had the NetScape server, free, included with the IRIX OS, on every server with a full HTML configuration interface in an age where most other companies still didn't have an officially supported HTTPD for their platform. They also included Indigo Magic, the FIRST full GUI HTML editor, again, free with the OS, as well as a full GUI VRML editor, and so on.

      I truly weep for the company SGI used to be. It was the best job I ever had and the one I wish had never ended.
      • I never worked for SGI, but I loved the spirit of the company and their products.

        I think (and thought at the time) they should have focused on a cheaper version of their products and tried to be an Apple alternative. They had the best OS out there until MacOS X came up, and it took a long time for MacOS X to work as well as Irix did. Most people aware of the company had very warm feelings about SGI products and the OS and I think they could have used that.

        I reluctantly wound up switching from SGI hardware
      • SGI did not own the Internet space. Just because they had those on their platform doesn't mean they "owned" anything.

        Mosaic - and shortly afterward, Netscape - was on every platform you can name. Httpd was supported on all those platforms too. By the time the "Internet revolution" and all the hype (and corruption) that drove up the stock market in the 90s, SGI was in the beginning of it's decline.

        Sure, they had a great campus, they had great people working for them, but it didn't take long for it to
      • Sorry, the first web browser was also the first "full GUI HTML editor." WorldWideWeb.app by Tim Berners Lee.
      • Sad Sad day. I worked for them for almost seventeen years (under 1000 Employee #).....laid off about three years ago. Best company I ever worked for, and a great place to be. Some of the sharpest engineering folks I've ever seen, and the most idiotic management on the planet. The only reason SGI survived as long as it did was due to their exceptional technology (on many levels), but because of the fools at the helm, it didn't have a chance to succeed. As far as I'm concerned, even though hit continued to ri

      • backplane speed? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by YesIAmAScript (886271) on Monday May 08 2006, @10:53AM (#15285664)
        What's the backplane speed you refer to?

        This say the GIO64 backplane speed in Indigo2 was 266MB/sec.

        This was probably great then, given the limitations of FPM RAM (EDO wasn't even around yet!), but it is peanuts now. Intel's FSBs and AMDs HTs hover at about 30 times this speed now, and there are plenty of slots which exceed this speed too.

        Am I missing something? I only looked this up because the amount of time SGI has been out of the loop pretty much means that their systems cannot be anything special compared to current hardware. That doesn't mean they weren't ahead of their time, just that a lot of time has passed and even things that were ahead of their time then are nothing special now.

        I had a couple friends who work at SGI and I was heavy into the computer graphics market then. SGI were doomed before they bought Cray. They basically started by taking the work of Evans & Sutherland and bring it to a whole new marketplace. They realized the potential of computer graphics in a broader market, not just defense and similar companies. The problem was, the market was even broader than SGI expected.

        Oddly, it was the horrible Matrox Mystique video card that signalled the end for SGI. It wasn't the first 3D PC card, but for many people, it was the first one they owned and used. It ran Tomb Raider with 3d acceleration. These kinds of cards created a whole new market for 3D hardware. This board marketbase pumped money into these companies (Matrox, ATI, S3, and soon after, NVidia) very quickly. And this allowed them to advance their hardware rapidly to the point where a well-equipped PC could match the 3D performance of an SGI box.

        SGI was addicted to selling $80K workstations in small numbers, and PCs running 3D Studio Max that could be configured for a bit over $10K just overran them. SGI refused to adapt. Because of their overhead, perhaps it was impossible for SGI to adapt. So SGI was in a marketplace where a 3D workstation could only fetch $10K (and falling), with a business model and overhead (like owning your own CPU designer, writing your own OS) that made it impossible for them to compete.

        End of SGI.

        I don't understand your assertion that SGI was an internet player. The cost of their systems meant you couldn't afford to buy an SGI for anything that didn't involve heavy graphics, or else you'd be wasting your money. SUN really did rule the roost there, for a while. Until a broad switch to PCs whomped them too.
    • Summary:

      * New CEO/CFO
      * Major holders (read investors) get to keep their shares, everyone else gets nothing
      * They have already reduced their size by $100M, and another $50M is coming (layoffs mostly, I imagine)
      * They remain optimistic.

      IMHO: They are doomed, but if the new CEO isn't just a "make it worth enough to pay off the debt" sort of guy, they could harvest the value of the Cray and SGI brands and parley them into a major product line once again. It would take the vision of a Steve Jobs type, but it cou
    • Well, there's a link on the SGI homepage [sgi.com] now. I like the way they avoid the wording "Chapter 11" like the plague...
      • What, you mean like this text in the second paragraph? "...the Company and its U.S. subsidiaries have filed voluntary petitions under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code."
  • A lot of movies companies used to use SGI computers for special effects in the 90's, however a lot of them have switched to regular pcs and macs due to increases in technology.

    So the question is are the SGI workstations worth the cost? Is SGI going to survive.

    And for karma whoring here is the wikipedia index on SGI's history:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics [wikipedia.org]

    • So the question is are the SGI workstations worth the cost? Is SGI going to survive[?]

      I don't know; let's check their company for signs of health.
    • When your core business is high end and you push products through lots of R&D then have your market sapped by commodity products, its easy to overstep your budget and not adjust the business quickly enough. Even worse of course if the people in charge don't see the train comming down the tracks for a long time, which is what often happens in bigger businesses. SGI is also in a more vulnerable position than say Sun because Sun can deploy a server that is expected to stay put (and need support) for ma

  • Sad (Score:4, Insightful)

    by syylk (538519) on Monday May 08 2006, @08:02AM (#15284557) Homepage
    I worked with IRIX at some point of my career. Nothing impressive, mind you. But the machine was stylish and the aura of "eliteness" leaked from every vent grill. Onyxes, Octanes, Origins... They could be beat by a low-level GPU these days, but back then, they were wet dreams coming true.

    I'm sad to see them go. Not surprised, but still a bit sad.

    Erwin will need a new home...
    • Hell yeah. Irices were maybe not impressive, but certainly cool.

      I browsed some SGI docs literally a hour ago just to make a piece of software portable to Irix -- not out of any necessity or even utility, but just because of the old fondness.

      Sleep well, Indy. We'll miss you.

    • Re:Sad (Score:3, Informative)

      by turgid (580780)

      I worked with IRIX at some point of my career. Nothing impressive, mind you.

      I keep hearing this from ex-Irix and Solaris users. Solaris and Irix were the best unixes at one point (1990's). However, their greatness was internal, in the kernel. Most users never got to see it.

      I've never used Irix, but speaking for Solaris, the user land was pretty archaic and clumsy (the commands and utilities) compared to the GNU userland (the commands on Linux). Sun finally realised this in 2004 and started migrating the

  • Nothing there yet.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rob T Firefly (844560) on Monday May 08 2006, @08:02AM (#15284558) Homepage Journal
    the SGI Investor's Relation page doesn't say anything

    They'll add it in with green-screen later.

  • To be perfectly honest... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by furry_marmot (515771) on Monday May 08 2006, @08:04AM (#15284565) Homepage
    ...I'm surprised it took this long. After throwing over their own OS for NT workstations and losing the high-end specialty graphics market, they veered into supercomputers and bought Cray, which didn't help either company, and they haven't done anything interesting in years. RIP SGI

  • Terribly sad (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mccalli (323026) on Monday May 08 2006, @08:04AM (#15284571) Homepage
    Got to say that I find this terribly sad. When I started in computing, SGI used to be some magical company that I aspired to touching the hem of - sort of how Pixar is viewed today, although obviously without the narrative bit.

    I know it was inevitable. I know the economics. I know various other things but still...still...it's a sad, sad day.

    Cheers,
    Ian

    • I am sad too and I just hope no 16 year old around to say "who cares" since I won't care for my karma or anything to reply.

      At least, respect for OpenGL folks!

      Or if you have a EA game or something , look at the credits at the last page of manual. Always some SGI libs involved.

        • Re:Terribly sad (Score:4, Interesting)

          by WinterSolstice (223271) on Monday May 08 2006, @09:37AM (#15285090)
          I know how you feel - it killed me when DEC was sold off. One of the best and brightest, IMHO.

          Ok - time for a bit of a sad old-timer rant (feel free to skip if you think computers always came with Windows)

          <rant>
          I really miss the magic that was there in some of those old companies - DEC, SGI, H-P... back when IBM was the big enemy and the biggest thrill I had was reading some new press release and thinking of ways to really do something cool with it. I remember looking at the camera on the old SGI screens and wondering if Jetson style video-phones were right around the corner. I remember running a lab of Indy workstations and feeling like I had the monopoly on "cool". Back when Windows still needed Trumpet WinSock and I was playing MUDs halfway across the country on an AlphaStation.
          I've never seen a documentation system as nice as "help" before or since. Compilers that took *any* major language and optimized it really well. A database (RDB) that ran so well that when we ported it to Sun it took 5 times the hardware dollars to make it work. Oracle doesn't hold a candle to it...
          How about real clustering? How about a software company that makes defacto standards so effective EVERYONE uses them (like OpenGL or GLUT?)
          Why is it that things like "external processors", "clustering", and "grid computing", keep getting touted as though they were new? Do any of these self-proclaimed Unix gurus even *know* why tty is called that?
          For all the people who think Microsoft invented BASIC - for people who don't know that edit/tpu is the answer to the question of "vi or emacs" - and for those who have never had a RACF account; I pity you. You missed out on some of the really cool parts of the computer age. Heck, I bet a lot of the younger people on here never even coded stuff for GLIDE... and that was a *PC* level tech (and a nice one!).

          I am saddened by the demise of the "science" part of computer science. In this era is there still room for wonder? As much as I delight in the cross compatibility and functionality of the new computers, I am saddened more by the lack of people who truly appreciate how we got them. It's probably the same feeling that the last steam train engineers felt as diesel engines took over - or perhaps the feeling modern diesel engineers feel at the trucks and planes that have largely replaced them.

          Oh well. We've all had this discussion before, and I guess I'm just getting too old. At least one benefit of all that is having two VNC sessions open to WinXP and 5 terminals open to my Sun servers on my MBP with the full OpenGL desktop.

          </rant>
          -WS
    • I don't know that it was inevitable. There are far more people using far more computers today to do things then were at the height of SGI. There is more money going into hardware today then went in in the late 80's and early 90's. There are lots of people who want be able to do sound and video better than you can do with so / so hardware.

      I don't see any reason there can't be a workstation market today.

  • Unexpected (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wombatmobile (623057) on Monday May 08 2006, @08:05AM (#15284581)

    Old age is the most unexpected [accelerating.org] of things that can happen to a man. -- Trotsky

  • Seeing as Inferno is shipped as a HW/SW package for SGI boxes only. I guess that's a niche product though.

  • Something died inside of us all... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MindPrison (864299) on Monday May 08 2006, @08:16AM (#15284645) Journal
    I remember fondly my first encounter with 3D graphics, from the TRON movies, man - that was many years ago, the SGI computers was the no.1 on my wishlist as a kid - but a machine like that where WAY too expensive, and thats where the Commodore Amiga came and stole our hearts, all of a sudden - 3D became affordable, SGI did'nt belive in "3D-for-everyone" and I believe that would be the main reason for their demise.

    You've got to put your belief in the little guy on the street if you want to survive, being boss - playing big, with the big - will only work until the rest of us grow up. And we did, but SGI didn't invest in our future together, if they did - we would have embraced them without as much as a seconds hesitation, but if you keep selling to the elite party (those with WAY too much money) you're out of tune with the development.


    (For those too thick to read between the lines - it simply ment, they didn't follow the times)
    • Computing becoming more affordable made for leaner times for a lot of those high-end workstation vendors. They were very specialized and couldn't innovate as fast as the industry as a whole. And perhaps they were resting on their laurels and didn't realize the danger until it was too late. I know the attitude at IBM at least up until the mid to late 90's was that PCs were toys and if you wanted real computing you shelled out big bucks for big iron.

      When the 386 appeared on the scene and it became feasible

  • Info about the Chapter 11 is up now, via a press release:

    http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_rel eases/2006/may/sgi_reorg.html [sgi.com]

    From the release:
    "As part of this agreement with many of its major stakeholders, and as the next step in its previously announced plan to reorganize its businesses, the Company and its U.S. subsidiaries have filed voluntary petitions under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. SGI's non-U.S. subsidiaries, including European, Canadian, Mexican, South American and Asia Pacific subsidiaries were not included in the filing; will continue their business operations without supervision from the U.S. courts; and will not be subject to the requirements of chapter 11. The Company expects to file its Plan of Reorganization reflecting the agreement shortly, and to emerge from Chapter 11 within six months."

  • One less icon for Slashdot to manage (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Will make those new look and feel updates to Slashdot all the more easy to create.

  • SGI collectors items (Score:3, Funny)

    by chiph (523845) on Monday May 08 2006, @08:19AM (#15284665)
    My SGI shirts are now collectors items!
    Woooot!

    Chip H.
  • Almost 10 years ago, I had the use of two packed-to-the-gills Reality Engines, one supplied by Nintendo when I was doing game AI work and one by Disney when I was the lead on a virtual reality prototype.

    I am not a computer graphics specialist, but it was great to work with full screen graphics at a high frame rate. The artistic types at Angel Studios where I worked created amazing 3d models, textures, and environments - really, some of the most fun I ever had working.

  • Sorry to see them go... (Score:5, Informative)

    by saha (615847) on Monday May 08 2006, @08:35AM (#15284747)
    ...although I'm surprised it took this long. Their upper management really was a mess and lacked focus. Their venture into the the Windows NT boxes and Itanium platform didn't help much either.

    Heck, I use a Powerbook G4 for most of my tasks these days and my SGI O2 and SGI 320 NT box in my office are used little these days, but the Macs do lack some advanced hardware features that are only available on Infinite Reality gfx boards and Tezro v12. See Discreet's website and you'll notice that Flame, Inferno and Fire still run on ONLY SGI hardware. SGI InfiniteReality boards are used as image generators for flight military flight simulators and also to drive the Inferno compositing and film mastering, using up to 32 film resolution layers and 10-bit anti-aliased graphics

    Sure, Nvidia and ATI cards go have an polygon count advantage and they do have features like pixel and vertex shaders, but overall for high fidelity graphics one still goes back to SGIs. If one looks at what is capable in Final Cut Pro HD, it still falls in terms of output quality compared to what an SGI can handle. For video DMediaPro options with support for two streams of high-definition 10-bit 4:4:4:4 RGBA video. Or if one needed to generate your own video signal. Programmable FPGA video card or drive a C.A.V.E. or Powerwall SGI Mutichannel Option cards are capable of doing this. I have yet to see PC based Image Generator be as successful at doing this without a lot of hacking, blood, sweat and tears. SGI's handle the tough visualization tasks do out of the box. SGI's gfx API are second to none

    OpenGL Inventor

    OpenGL Multipipe (+ SDK)

    OpenGL Optimizer

    OpenGL Performer

    OpenGL Shader

    OpenGL Vizserver

    OpenGL Volumizer

    ImageVision and Image Format Library (IFL)

    SGI was a great company, although it was badly mismanaged. I'd love to see it merged with Apple and all the SGI gfx API's integrated into OS X. Plus other tecnologies like ccNUMA, XFS, CXFS, NUMAlink4 (6.4GBs), NUMAflex combined with Hypertransport and Infiniband (when customers need cheaper solution than NUMAlink)

    • See Discreet's website and you'll notice that Flame, Inferno and Fire still run on ONLY SGI hardware. SGI InfiniteReality boards are used as image generators for flight military flight simulators and also to drive the Inferno compositing and film mastering, using up to 32 film resolution layers and 10-bit anti-aliased graphics

      This is no longer true. Discreet has now ported all of their software to Linux PCs. Even the Inferno (which was the last). I was at NAB last week (major tradeshow for the media busin

    • I can cite a few reasons why SGI has fallen on hard times:

      1. Current Linux distributions can run workstation level hardware/software.

      2. x86-compatible machines now have powerful enough CPU's to run workstation level hardware/software.

      3. High-end graphics cards using the nVidia Quadro GPU chipset can do most of what SGI machines can do in terms of graphics but at much lower cost.

      Why do you think Dreamworks Animation is using AMD CPU boxes with high-end graphics cards running Linux?

  • SGI Workstations (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 10Ghz (453478) on Monday May 08 2006, @08:39AM (#15284762)
    I hope that someone will buy their MIPS-based workstation-business. What I would like to see is for someone to take that business, beef it up a bit, and port the whole lineup to Linux. I would say that there would be a sizeable market for quality MIPS-workstations that run Linux.

    How about.... HyperTransport-links between CPU's, integrated mem-controllers, on-die L2-caches, HTX-expansion, multicore, multi-CPU-setups. All this, and running Linux. Hell, those changes alone would give us a nice boost, even if the CPU-core (R16000A IIRC) itself stayed relatively same.

  • SGI is now a good bargain (Score:5, Insightful)

    by csoto (220540) on Monday May 08 2006, @08:54AM (#15284833)
    With a Chapter 11 reorg, a potential buyer would get access to a lot of very interesting HPC technology, without a lot of liability. This is what the current bondholders are counting on - buy it while it's cheap and sell it for more to some other company.

    What do you get (of any value) when you snap up SGI?

    -XFS/XVM/CXFS - one of the best storage environments out there in production
    -OpenGL/VAN
    -DMF/TMF
    -GRIO
    -Numerous other subsystems to IRIX/Linux

    Their hardware hasn't kept pace as well. However, there's still a lot to like about the architecture (HyperTransport looks so much like SGI-Craylink). They're about the only ones who managed to make something useful of Itanium (another straw on the camel's back). Perhaps someone could do something with it, provided they supply the needed R&D money.

  • Now is the time... (Score:4, Informative)

    by robbo (4388) <slashdot AT simra DOT net> on Monday May 08 2006, @08:57AM (#15284848) Homepage
    ... to mirror the STL progammer's guide [sgi.com] (for personal use, of course).

    It's sad to see them go, and not just for their cool h/w. This is the company that brought us OpenGL and, for a long time, the only useful STL documentation on the web (not to mention Irix had a working c++ compiler). I can almost forgive them for IRIX 6.5.

  • I thank SGI for a lot of my early career... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Darth Maul (19860) on Monday May 08 2006, @09:22AM (#15284985) Homepage
    It's a shame, because back in the early 90's I got into comp sci and computer graphics, using Indigos and Onyx machines in all my early work. I even bought an Indy for use in college, and there's no way I would have been able to do such cool project work in school without it. It's a shame to see this, because I was as big a fan as SGI could have had back in the day, but I know the day SGI started its decline.

    It was SIGGRAPH 2000. New Orleans. I got an invite to the SGI party, and we were all expecting a huge new announcement of a SGI-brand PC graphics card. This would have been the smart move, because about this time PC cards were starting to eat into SGI's markets... So why not use the amazing brand name of SGI and produce a killer PC card? So what did SGI announce? A new line of supercomputers. There were audible groans in the crowd.

    Oh well, it was part of history. My Indy still works just fine, and I was even able to update to a newer version of Irix recently... And I'll still wear my SGI shirts, thankyouverymuch ;-).

    • The rise of cheap 3d cards and Linux made the high priced closed SGI Workstations hard to sell. Back in 1994-1995 I had a SGI Indy on my desk complete with 256meg of memory. Ah what a sweet machine....

    • Standard Template Library (Score:5, Informative)

      by mosel-saar-ruwer (732341) on Monday May 08 2006, @08:04AM (#15284574)

      My question is; where they contributing anything new to the maket recently

      It may not be all that "recent", but if you're a C++ programmer, you might want to download a copy of this documentation before the bankruptcy trustees pull the plug on the server:

    • Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FuzzyDaddy (584528) on Monday May 08 2006, @08:10AM (#15284608) Journal
      I used to work in the military simulation business about six years ago. SGI used to be the dominant player for real time graphics for the visuals for things like flight simulators. Even then, their fortunes were declining. The fundemental problem was that the problem in military simulation was not getting harder, and the commodity hardware was getting to the level of being able to handle it. People now longer had to pay the premium for the SGI equipment.

      I don't think they stopped doing what they were doing - they just never came up with a strategy to handle the new reality.

    • From the press release on Yahoo: This reorganization is planned with no disruption to day-to-day customer and partner activities as the Company positions itself to recapture mindshare and market share. Over the last 100 days, the Company under the leadership of its new management team has had several significant achievements. During this time it has:

      Assembled a new management team including a new Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, as well as the appointment of other experienced executive

    • The money's not in hardware anymore - hasn't been for a long time unless you can supply a massive like and do it well. Professional Services is where it's at now - IBM learned this in the early 90's.

      Big hardware companies need to seriously change their outlook - if it can be done with a PC, it will eventually be done with a PC cheaply, the question is not what the "box" does, it's who's the best at providing the service.
    • From what I have seen lately (talk of SGI adding an opteron range to its lines, as well as pruneing some of the dead wood of specialty hardware) they seem to be pushing toward the high-very high end server market, what with talks of putting ccNUMA backplanes with AMD cpus and getting out of the video side of things all together.

      Basically competeing with the high end SUN and low end CRAY setups, from the info I have read about these chap 11 fileings, they are just removeing some old debts and have been promi
    • It's not just the commodity workstations that did them in. Their high-end equipment was increasingly uncompetitive against IBM/HP/Sun. They did a lot of thrashing; they were going to compete on mid-range business systems (crushed by Sun/Linux from below and IBM/HP/Sun from above), then they were going to compete on supercomputers by buying Cray (sold the machine they didn't understand to Sun, which called it the E10000 Starfire, and sold billions, while SGI ended up selling Cray to Tera for a loss), then

    • XFS (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ex-geek (847495)
      My question is; where they contributing anything new to the maket recently
      The XFS filesystem [sgi.com]
      I'm using this on a couple of machines. I sure hope that somebody will continue to maintain it.

      This bankrupcy doesn't surprise me at all. I saw this coming for more than five years. But I remember having arguments with SGI fans who tried to defend the Indefensible.
    • I am not sure there is a market for Unix workstations.

      There are few things that spot opportunities as well as companies competing for space. The lack of offerings indicates the lack of a consumer market - it indicates that those who want non x-86 Unix-like desktops (and I would love to see a Niagara, MIPS, XCPU, Cell or ARM-based desktop computer - I love diversity) are very few.

      Modern x86 PCs, as dull as they are, are quite capable Unix workstations and, in many respects, are well beyond any desktop system

    • Re:OpenGL? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Glock27 (446276) on Monday May 08 2006, @09:49AM (#15285185)
      IIRC, doesnt microsoft hold a good amount of ownership over opengl?

      No.

      and now that SGI will more than likely be leaving the playing field, wont this mean that OGL will belong to microsoft?

      No, the OpenGL ARB controls OpenGL, not SGI. Check the website [opengl.org].

      who will more than likely take it, lock it up, and sue the living fuck out of anyone who implements it? (read, makes free software implementations without paying absurd royalty costs)

      No. SGI is far from the most important company relying on OpenGL. Check the ARB member list: 3DLabs, Apple, ATI, Dell, IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, SGI, and Sun Microsystems.

      OpenGL is fine.

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