Silicon Graphics
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. On May 8, 2006 SGI filed for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
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.
Founding
Jim Clark left his position as an electrical engineering associate professor at
Stanford University to found SGI in 1982 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.
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.
RISC era
With the introduction of the
IRIS 4D series, SGI switched over to using the
MIPS RISC microprocessor architecture. 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.
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 ('
Direct3D' from Microsoft) only runs on MS Windows-based machines.
ACE Consortium
SGI was part of the early-90s
Advanced Computing Environment initiative with twenty others, including
Compaq,
Digital Equipment Corporation,
MIPS Computer Systems,
Groupe Bull,
Siemens,
NEC,
NetPower,
Microsoft and
Santa Cruz Operation to introduce workstations based on the
MIPS architecture and capable of running
Windows NT and
SCO UNIX. The group produced the
Advanced RISC Computing or ARC specification. The consortium fell apart, apparently for political rather than technical reasons.
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.
Name and logo changes
 |
SGI's "Acronym" logo |
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.
Alias, Wavefront, Cray and Intergraph 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 the well-known
supercomputer manufacturer
Cray Research for $740 million[
1], and began to use marketing names such as "CrayLink" for (SGI developed) technology integrated into the SGI server line. Three months later, it sold the SPARC/Solaris part of the Cray business to
Sun Microsystems for an undisclosed amount (widely assumed to be $50 million). SGI sold most of the remaining Cray business and the Cray brand to
Tera Computer Company on
March 31,
2000 for $35 million plus one million shares[
2]. SGI also distributed its remaining interest in
MIPS Technologies through a spin-off effective
June 20,
2000.
In September 2000, SGI acquired the Zx10 series of Windows workstations and servers from
Intergraph Computer Systems. These models were rebadged as SGI systems, but discontinued in June 2001.
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.
Switch to Itanium
In 1998, 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 mainstream 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 uncompetitive. Eventually they were forced to introduce faster MIPS processors, the R12000, R14000 and R16000, which were used in a series of models from 2002 onwards, and continue to be sold to this day.
SGI's first Itanium-based system was the short-lived SGI 750 workstation, launched in 2001. SGI's MIPS-based system were not to be superseded until the launch of the Itanium 2-based
Altix servers and
Prism workstations some time later. Unlike the MIPS-based systems, these models use
Linux (
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server with SGI enhancements) as their
operating system instead of
IRIX. 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.
The Decline of SGI
The addition of 3D graphic capabilities to the
PC and the ability of clusters of
Linux or
*BSD-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, the
Apple Macintosh and
Microsoft Windows has further eroded the low end of SGI's product line.
In addition, SGI's premature announcement of its MIPS-to-Itanium architecture migration (still uncompleted, as of 2006) and its abortive ventures into IA-32 architecture systems (the
Visual Workstation line, the ex-Intergraph Zx10 range and the SGI 1000-series Linux servers) damaged the company's credibility in the market.
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 seven billion dollars in 1995 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. [
3]
On
May 8th 2006, it was announced that SGI had filed for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. [
4]
SGI Working On Returning to Profitability
In Spring 2006 SGI engaged the services of Alix Partners, to advise it on returning the firm to profitability.
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. Dennis McKenna to be the new SGI CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors. McKenna succeeds SGI CEO and Chairman Robert Bishop. Mr. Bishop was named Vice President of SGI and the Board of Directors.
On May 8, 2006, SGI announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for itself and U.S. subsidiaries as part of a plan to reduce debt by $250 million. Two days later, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court approved SGI's 'first-day motions' and approved its use of a $70 million financing facility provided by a group of its bondholders. Foreign subsidiaries are unaffected.
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.
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, 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. The NASA Supercomputer "Columbia" is an Altix cluster of 20, 512 processor computers running Linux.
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
ASC Purple, all built by
IBM.
Current SGI products
MIPS-based systems
*
Fuel entry-level workstation*
Tezro high-end workstation*
Origin 350 mid-range server*
Origin 3000 high-end serverIntel Xeon-based systems
*
Altix XE-series serversItanium-based systems
*
Prism high-end workstation*
Altix 330 mid-range server*
Altix 350 mid-range server*
Altix 3000 high-end server*
Altix 4000 high-end serverPast SGI products
Motorola 68k-based systems
*
SGI IRIS 1000 series*
SGI IRIS 2000 series*
SGI IRIS 3000 seriesMIPS-based systems
=Workstations
=
*
Professional IRIS series (IRIS 4D/50/60/70/80/85)*
Personal IRIS series (IRIS 4D/20/25/30/35)*
IRIS Power Series (IRIS 4D/1x0/2x0/3x0/4x0)*
IRIS Crimson (deskside workstation/server)*
IRIS Indigo series (Indigo, Indigo R4000)*
Indigo² series (Indigo², Power Indigo², Indigo² R10000)*
Indy workstation*
O2/O2+ workstation*
Octane workstation*
Octane2 workstation*
Onyx (deskside and larger workstations)*
Onyx2 (deskside and larger workstations)*
Power Onyx (deskside and larger workstations)*
Onyx R10000 (deskside and larger workstations)*
Onyx 350 (Origin 350 with graphics hardware)*
Onyx 3000 (Origin 3000 with graphics hardware)*
Onyx4 visualization system=Servers
=
*
Challenge S (desktop server)*
Challenge M/Power Challenge M (desktop server)*
Challenge DM (deskside server)*
Challenge L/Power Challenge/Challenge 10000 (deskside server)*
Challenge XL/Power Challenge XL (rack server)*
Origin 200 mid-range server*
Origin 2000 high-end server*
Origin 300 mid-range serverIA-32-based systems
*
SGI 320 Visual Workstation (Windows NT)
*
SGI 540 Visual Workstation (Windows NT)
*
SGI 230 Workstation (Linux/Windows NT)
*
SGI 330 Workstation (Linux/Windows NT)
*
SGI 550 Workstation (Linux/Windows NT)
* SGI Zx10 Visual Workstation (Windows)
* SGI Zx10 VE Visual Workstation (Windows)
* SGI Zx10 Server (Windows)
* SGI 1100 server (Linux/Windows)
* SGI 1200 server (Linux/Windows)
* SGI 1400 server (Linux/Windows)
* SGI 1450 server (Linux/Windows)
* SGI Internet Server (Linux)
* SGI Internet Server for E-commerce (Linux)
* SGI Internet Server for Messaging (Linux)
Itanium-based systems
* SGI 750 workstation
*
IRIX*
Columbia*
SCO and SGI*
OpenGL*
XFSOfficial SGI Information
*
Official websiteGeneral Unofficial SGI Information
*
Nekochan - SGI enthusiast resource*
Schrotthal.de - images of SGI systems*
SGIstuff - information on SGI systems and technologies*
SiliconBunny - SGI technical information and resources*
Silicon Graphics IRIS 2000/3000 FAQ*
The Silicon Graphics Refrigerator Project
