Silicon Graphics

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Template:Infobox Company$730 million USD (2005)| 

homepage = www.sgi.com

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Silicon Graphics, Inc., also known as SGI, began as a maker of graphics display terminals in 1982. It was founded by Jim Clark and Abbey Silverstone. The initial products were based on Jim Clark's work with geometry pipelines, specialized software or hardware that accelerates the display of three-dimensional images. SGI was originally incorporated as a California corporation in November 1981, and reincorporated as a Delaware corporation in January 1990.

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History

The products produced by SGI, as well as the strategies and market positions pursued by the company, have varied since SGI was founded. However, the graphical computing workstation industry has remained a focus and core business of SGI throughout its history.

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Founding

Jim Clark left his position as an electrical engineering associate professor at Stanford University to found SGI along with Abbey Silverstone and a cadre of Stanford graduate students including Kurt Akeley, Tom Davis, Rocky Rhodes, Marc Hannah, Herb Kuta, and Mark Grossman joined them 2 months later. The Mayfield Group supplied the initial venture funding.

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First generation of products

The first IRIS 1000-series machines (IRIS standing for "Integrated Raster Imaging System") were designed to be connected to a DEC VAX computer as a graphics terminal, handling only the actual display. These were based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, with a motherboard design related to that of the Sun-1. After that, SGI began using the UNIX System V operating system to power the machine. Their height was reached with the IRIS 3130, a complete UNIX workstation using the Motorola 68020 with an attached Weitek math coprocessor.

The 3130 was powerful enough to support a complete 3D animation and rendering package on its own without mainframe support. With large capacity hard drives (300MB X 2), streaming tape and Ethernet it could be the centerpiece of an animation operation.

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RISC era

With the introduction of the IRIS 4D series, SGI switched over to using the MIPS RISC microprocessors.. These machines were correspondingly more powerful, able to address more memory and came with powerful on-board math capability. These machines made much of the SGI name as 3D graphics became more popular on television and film.

SGI produced a broad range of MIPS-based workstations and servers during the 1990s, running SGI's version of UNIX System V, now called IRIX. These included the massive Onyx visualization systems, the size of refrigerators and capable of supporting up to 64 processors while managing up to three streams of high resolution, fully realized 3D graphics.

In 1992, MIPS released the first 64-bit MIPS microprocessor, the R4000, which was the first commercially released 64-bit RISC microprocessor (a market joined by Digital's Alpha chip, inter alia, soon thereafter). IRIX 6.2 was the first fully 64-bit IRIX release, including 64-bit pointers.

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IrisGL and OpenGL

Up until the second generation Onyx Reality Engine machines, SGI offered access to their high performance 3D graphics subsystems through a proprietary API known as 'Iris Graphics Language' (IrisGL). As more features were added over the years, IrisGL became harder to maintain and cumbersome to use. In 1992, SGI decided to clean up and reform IrisGL and made the bold move of allowing the resulting OpenGL API be cheaply licensed by SGI's competitors - and yet further to set up an industry-wide consortium to maintain the OpenGL standard. (The OpenGL Architecture Review Board).

This meant that for the first time, fast, efficient cross-platform graphics programs could be written.

To this day, OpenGL remains the only real-time 3D graphics standard to be portable across a variety of operating systems. Its only competitor ('Direct-X' from Microsoft) only runs on MS Windows-based machines.

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ARC effort

SGI was part of an early-90s initiative with Compaq, Digital Equipment Corporation, MIPS Computer Systems, Groupe Bull, Siemens, NEC, NetPower and Microsoft to introduce RISC-based Windows NT workstations (the Advanced RISC Computing, or ARC, initiative), but the efforts failed when Compaq changed management and Microsoft ultimately dropped NT support for MIPS and DEC Alpha processors.

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Entertainment industry

An SGI computer with the FSN three-dimensional file system navigator appeared in the 1993 movie Jurassic Park. One trademark of this scene is Lex's line, "This is a Unix system. I know this."

In the movie Twister, the heroes can be seen using an SGI laptop. It is in fact a working SGI, with a motherboard similar to that of the Indy. SGI made thirty or so in the early 90s, making the laptop quite a rarity. Given the power-hungry nature of the MIPS chip, not to mention what such a device would have cost in a time when an Apple PowerBook was considered expensive, the laptop was not a venture SGI seemed to be interested in taking.

Once inexpensive PCs began to catch up with SGI's bread-and-butter—the higher-priced specialized graphical workstations—in terms of graphics performance, SGI concentrated on its high performance server capabilities, offering servers for digital video and the Web. Many SGI graphics engineers have left to work at other computer graphics companies like ATI and Nvidia, contributing to the PC 3D graphics revolution. SGI manufactured a groundbreaking LCD video monitor, the 1600SW.

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Name and logo changes

Image:Sgi logo.png In response to these market changes, Silicon Graphics Inc. changed its corporate identity to "SGI" in an attempt to clarify their current market position as more than simply a graphics company, although the legal name of the company remained unchanged. At the same time in 1999, SGI announced a new logo—simply the letters "sgi" in a stylized lowercase font — which drew criticism for wasting the professional goodwill associated with the previous box-outline logo. The new logo was a proprietary typeface called "SGI," created by branding and design consulting firm Landor Associates, in collaboration with designer Joe Stitzlein.

The cube logo was later readopted by SGI. Currently both logos are in use.

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Alias, Wavefront and Cray acquisitions

In 1995, SGI purchased Alias Research and Wavefront Technologies and merged the companies into Alias|Wavefront, now known as Alias Systems Corporation. Later, in June 2004, SGI sold Alias to the private equity investment firm Accel-KKR for $57.1 million. On October 4, 2005, Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) announced that it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Alias for $182 million in cash.

In February 1996, SGI purchased Cray Research, and began to use marketing names such as "CrayLink" for (SGI developed) technology integrated into the SGI server line. SGI later sold part of the Cray product line to Tera Computer Company on March 31, 2000. SGI also distributed its remaining interest in MIPS Technologies through a spin-off effective June 20, 2000.

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Late 1990s and recent developments

Another attempt by SGI in the late 1990's to introduce its own family of Intel-based workstations running Windows NT (see also SGI Visual Workstation) proved to be a financial disaster, and shook customer confidence in SGI's commitment to its own MIPS-based line.

SGI has also been a big booster of the Linux operating system, supporting several projects (such as Samba) and providing some previously proprietary code (such as XFS) to the free software world.

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Switch to Itanium

In the late 1990s SGI announced that future generations of their machines would be based not on their own MIPS processors, but the new "super-chip" from Intel, the Itanium. Funding for their own high-end processors was constrained, and it was planned that the R10000 would be the last MIPS desktop processor. MIPS would focus entirely on the embedded market, where they were having some success, and SGI would no longer have to fund development of a CPU that, since the failure of ARC, found use only in their own machines.

This plan quickly went awry. As early as 1999 it was clear the Itanium was going to be delivered very late, and then that it would have nowhere near the performance originally expected. As the production delays increased, MIPS' existing R10000-based machines grew increasingly outdated. Eventually they were forced to introduce new MIPS desktop processors, the R12000 and R14000, which were used in a series of machines starting in 2002, and continue to be sold to this day.

SGI was finally able to make the switch to the Itanium in their Altix servers and Prism workstations, although it is not clear how popular the latter system is. The new machines are in fact completely different than their earlier models, not only running the new processor, but also using Linux as their operating system instead of IRIX. Generally they can be thought of as "just another Itanium box", as opposed to a new generation of SGI machines.

SGI use Transitive's QuickTransit software to allow their old MIPS/Irix applications run on the new Itanium/Linux platform.

In the server space the Itanium-based lineup, the Altix, appears to have almost replaced the MIPS-based product line, the latter being de-emphasized on the SGI web site. In the workstation space, the switch, so far, appears to have been a complete failure.

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The Decline of SGI

The addition of 3D graphic capabilities to the PC and the ability of clusters of Linux or BSD UNIX-based PC's to take on many of the tasks of larger SGI servers has eaten into SGI's core markets. The porting of Maya to Linux and the Apple Macintosh has further eroded the low end of SGI's product line.

In November 2005, SGI announced that they had been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because their common stock had fallen below the minimum share price for listing on the exchange. SGI's market capitalization has dwindled from a peak of over four billion dollars in 1989 to just $120 million at the time of their delisting. In February 2006, the company announced that it may run out of cash by the end of the year, forcing a sale of the company or even bankruptcy. [1]

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SGI Working On Returning to Profitabilty

In Spring 2005 SGI engaged the services of Alix Partners, to advise it on returning the firm to profitability. While bankruptcy has been mentioned as a possibility there has been no confirmation of this as of February 24, 2006 to investors.

Since the hiring of Alix Partners, SGI has received a new line of credit, been delisted as expected and continued to build its business as evidenced by the press releases on the SGI Web Site and other sources.

A preliminary proxy filed with the SEC indicates that SGI Stockholders will consider giving the SGI Board of Directors authority to implement a reverse split of the common shares of stock at an official shareholders meeting anticipated in March 2006. If approved by stockholders the board would, at its discretion, determine if such a split is necessary and would determine the time of same.

In early 2006, SGI selected Mr. James McKenna to be the new SGI CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors. McKenna sucedes SGI CEO and Chairman Robert Bishop. Mr. Bishop was named Vice President of SGI and the Board of Directors.

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SGI user base and core market

Conventional wisdom holds that SGI's core market has traditionally been Hollywood special effects studios. In fact, SGI's largest markets in terms of dollars of revenue generated have always been government and defense applications, energy, and scientific and technical computing.

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High-end Server market

In recent years, SGI has continued to enhance its line of servers (of which the higher-end models are actually supercomputers) based around the SN architecture. SN, for Scalable Node, is a technology developed by SGI in the mid-1990s. SN is an example of CC-NUMA: Cache-coherent Non-uniform memory access. In an SN system, processors, memory, and a bus- and memory-controller are coupled together into an entity known as a node. A node is usually a single circuit board. Nodes are connected via a high-speed interconnect originally called CrayLink, since renamed NUMAlink. The result is a system that has no internal bus whatsoever. Rather, access between processors, memory, and I/O devices is facilitated through a switched fabric of links and routers. SN systems scale along several axes at once: as CPU count increases, so does memory capacity, I/O capacity, and system bisection bandwidth. The scalability of SN systems is a result of the cache-coherence of its distributed shared memory. This allows the combined memory of all the nodes to be accessed under a single OS image using standard shared-memory synchronization methods. This makes an SN system far easier to program and able to achieve a higher sustained vs peak performance ratio than non-cache-coherent systems like conventional Clusters or Massively parallel computers which require applications code to be written (or re-written) to do explicit message-passing communication between their nodes.

The first SN system, known as SN-0, was released in 1996 as the Origin family. Based on the MIPS R10000 processor, the Origin 200 scaled from one to four processors, and the Origin 2000 scaled from two to 128 processors. Later enhancements to the Origin 2000 line enabled systems of as large as 512 processors.

The second generation system, originally called SN-1 but later redubbed SN-MIPS, was released in July, 2000, under the product name Origin 3000. The Origin 3000 scaled from 4 to 512 processors, with 1,024-processor configurations delivered by special order to some customers. A smaller, less scalable implementation of the technology followed later under the name Origin 300.

In November, 2002, SGI announced a repackaging of their SN system, under the name Origin 3900. The Origin 3900 quadrupled the processor area density of the SN-MIPS system, from 32 processors per rack up to 128 processors per rack whilst moving to a FAT tree interconnect topology.

In January, 2003, SGI announced a variant of the SN-MIPS platform to be sold under the name Altix 3000. Known internally as SN-IA, the Altix 3000 used Intel Itanium 2 processors in place of the MIPS R1x000 processors in the SN-0 and SN-MIPS families. The Altix 3000 ran the Linux operating system. At the time it was released (and remains so to date), the Altix 3000 was the world's most scalable Linux-based computer, supporting up to 64 processors in a single system node. Multiple nodes could be connected together using the same NUMAlink technology to form what SGI predictably termed "superclusters."

In February of 2004, SGI announced general support for 128 processor nodes to be followed by 256 and 512 processor versions available later that year.

In April, 2004, SGI announced the selling of Alias for approx $57 million. Press release.

In October 2004, SGI broke the world's supercomputer speed record with Columbia, a supercomputer built for NASA's Ames Research Center. A cluster of 20 Altix supercomputers with a total of 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors, the system achieved sustained performance of 42.7 trillion floating-point calculations per second (teraflops), easily topping Japan's famed Earth Simulator, rated at 35.86 teraflops. Columbia's reign would be a short one -- about a week later, IBM's upgraded Blue Gene/L clocked in at 70.7 teraflops. As of November 2005, Columbia ranked No. 4, behind Blue Gene/L (now achieving 280.6 teraflops), a smaller Blue Gene, and ASCI Purple, all built by IBM.

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SGI product line

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Current SGI products

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Past SGI products

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Motorola 68k-based systems

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MIPS-based systems

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IA-32-based systems

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See also

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External links

Official SGI Information

General Unofficial SGI Information

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