Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American
high-performance computing
High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.
Overview
HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...
manufacturer, producing
computer hardware
Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the central processing unit (CPU), random-access memory (RAM), motherboard, computer data storage, graphics card, sound card, and computer case. It includes external devices ...
and
software
Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications.
The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...
. Founded in
Mountain View, California
Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the population was 82,376 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census.
Mountain V ...
, in November 1981 by
James H. Clark
James Henry Clark (born March 23, 1944) is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Netscape, myCFO, and Healtheon. His research work in compu ...
, the computer scientist and entrepreneur perhaps best known for founding
Netscape
Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was o ...
(with
Marc Andreessen
Marc Lowell Andreessen ( ; born July 9, 1971) is an American businessman and former software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and ...
). Its initial market was
3D graphics
3D computer graphics, sometimes called CGI, 3D-CGI or three-dimensional computer graphics, are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data (often Cartesian) that is stored in the computer for the purposes of perfor ...
computer workstation
A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...
s, but its products, strategies and market positions developed significantly over time.
Early systems were based on the
Geometry Engine that Clark and
Marc Hannah had developed at
Stanford University
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
, and were derived from Clark's broader background in
computer graphics
Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. ...
. The Geometry Engine was the first
very-large-scale integration (VLSI) implementation of a
geometry pipeline
Geometric manipulation of modelling primitives, such as that performed by a geometry pipeline, is the first stage in computer graphics systems which perform image generation based on geometric models. While geometry pipelines were originally implem ...
, specialized hardware that accelerated the "inner-loop" geometric computations needed to display three-dimensional images. For much of its history, the company focused on 3D imaging and was a major supplier of both hardware and software in this market.
Silicon Graphics reincorporated as a
Delaware corporation
The Delaware General Corporation Law (sometimes abbreviated DGCL), officially the General Corporation Law of the State of Delaware (Title 8, Chapter 1 of the Delaware Code), is the statute of the Delaware Code that governs corporate law in the U. ...
in January 1990. Through the mid to late-1990s, the rapidly improving performance of commodity
Wintel
Wintel (portmanteau of ''Windows'' and ''Intel'') is the partnership of Microsoft and Intel producing personal computers (PCs) using Intel x86-compatible processors running Windows.
Background
By the early 1980s, the chaos and incompatibility ...
machines began to erode SGI's stronghold in the 3D market. The porting of
Maya
Maya may refer to:
Ethnic groups
* Maya peoples, of southern Mexico and northern Central America
** Maya civilization, the historical civilization of the Maya peoples
** Mayan languages, the languages of the Maya peoples
* Maya (East Africa), a p ...
to other platforms was a major event in this process. SGI made several attempts to address this, including a disastrous move from their existing
MIPS platforms to the
Intel Itanium
Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and I ...
, as well as introducing their own
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
-based
Intel IA-32 based workstations and servers that failed in the market. In the mid-2000s the company repositioned itself as a
supercomputer
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...
vendor, a move that also failed.
On April 1, 2009, SGI filed for
Chapter 11
Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code ( Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, w ...
bankruptcy protection and announced that it would sell substantially all of its assets to Rackable Systems, a deal finalized on May 11, 2009, with Rackable assuming the name
Silicon Graphics International
Silicon Graphics International Corp. (SGI; formerly Rackable Systems, Inc.) was an American manufacturer of computer hardware and software, including high-performance computing systems, x86-based servers for datacenter deployment, and visuali ...
. The remnants of Silicon Graphics, Inc. became Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc.
History
Early years
James H. Clark
James Henry Clark (born March 23, 1944) is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Netscape, myCFO, and Healtheon. His research work in compu ...
left his position as an electrical engineering associate professor at
Stanford University
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
to found SGI in 1982 along with a group of seven graduate students and research staff from Stanford University:
Kurt Akeley,
David J. Brown,
Tom Davis, Rocky Rhodes,
Marc Hannah,
Herb Kuta, and
Mark Grossman; along with
Abbey Silverstone and a few others.
Growth
Ed McCracken was
CEO
A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization.
CEOs find roles in variou ...
of Silicon Graphics from 1984 to 1997.
During those years, SGI grew from annual revenues of $5.4 million to $3.7 billion.
[
]
Decline
The addition of 3D graphic capabilities to PCs, and the ability of clusters of Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
- and BSD
The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...
-based PCs to take on many of the tasks of larger SGI servers, ate into SGI's core markets. The porting of Maya
Maya may refer to:
Ethnic groups
* Maya peoples, of southern Mexico and northern Central America
** Maya civilization, the historical civilization of the Maya peoples
** Mayan languages, the languages of the Maya peoples
* Maya (East Africa), a p ...
to Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
, Mac OS and Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
further eroded the low end of SGI's product line.
In response to challenges faced in the marketplace and a falling share price, Ed McCracken was fired and SGI brought in Richard Belluzzo to replace him. Under Belluzzo's leadership a number of initiatives were taken which are considered to have accelerated the corporate decline.
One such initiative was trying to sell workstations running Windows NT
Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Original ...
called Visual Workstations in addition to workstations running IRIX
IRIX (, ) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS architecture, MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD extensio ...
, the company's version of UNIX
Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
. This put the company in even more direct competition with the likes of Dell, making it more difficult to justify a price premium. The product line was unsuccessful and abandoned a few years later.
SGI's premature announcement of its migration from MIPS to Itanium 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 SGI's credibility in the market.
In 1999, in an attempt to clarify their current market position as more than a graphics company, Silicon Graphics Inc. changed its corporate identity to "SGI", although its legal name was unchanged.
At the same time, SGI announced a new logo consisting of only the letters "sgi" in a proprietary font called "SGI", created by branding and design consulting firm Landor Associates
Landor is a brand consulting firm founded in 1941 by Walter Landor, who pioneered some research, design, and consulting methods that the branding industry still uses.
Headquartered in London, the company maintains 32 offices, including China, ...
, in collaboration with designer Joe Stitzlein. SGI continued to use the "Silicon Graphics" name for its workstation product line, and later re-adopted the cube logo for some workstation models.
In November 2005, SGI announced that it had been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District, Manhattan, Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is the List of stock exchanges, largest stock excha ...
because its common stock had fallen below the minimum share price for listing on the exchange. SGI's market capitalization
Market capitalization, sometimes referred to as market cap, is the total value of a publicly traded company's outstanding common shares owned by stockholders.
Market capitalization is equal to the market price per common share multiplied by ...
dwindled from a peak of over seven billion
Billion is a word for a large number, and it has two distinct definitions:
* 1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million, or (ten to the ninth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now the most common sense of the word in all varieties of ...
dollars in 1995 to just $120 million at the time of delisting. In February 2006, SGI noted that it could run out of cash by the end of the year.
Re-emergence
In mid-2005, SGI hired Alix Partners to advise it on returning to profitability and received a new line of credit. SGI announced it was postponing its scheduled annual December stockholders meeting until March 2006. It proposed a reverse stock split
In finance, a reverse stock split or reverse split is a process by which shares of corporate stock are effectively merged to form a smaller number of proportionally more valuable shares.
The "reverse stock split" appellation is a reference to th ...
to deal with the de-listing from the New York Stock Exchange.
In January 2006, SGI hired Dennis McKenna as its new CEO and chairman of the board of directors. Mr. McKenna succeeded Robert Bishop, who remained vice chairman of the board of directors.
On May 8, 2006, SGI announced that it had filed for Chapter 11
Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code ( Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, w ...
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 its first day motions and its use of a $70 million financing facility provided by a group of its bondholders. Foreign subsidiaries were unaffected.
On September 6, 2006, SGI announced the end of development for the MIPS/IRIX line and the IRIX operating system. Production would end on December 29 and the last orders would be fulfilled by March 2007. Support for these products would end after December 2013.
SGI emerged from bankruptcy protection on October 17, 2006. Its stock symbol on Pink Sheets at that point, ''SGID'', was canceled, and new stock was issued on the NASDAQ exchange under the symbol ''SGIC''. This new stock was distributed to the company's creditors, and the SGID common stockholders were left with worthless shares. At the end of that year, the company moved its headquarters from Mountain View to Sunnyvale
Sunnyvale () is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States.
Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101 and is bordered by portions of San Jose to the north, ...
. Its earlier North Shoreline headquarters is now occupied by the Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact ...
; the newer Amphitheatre Parkway headquarters was sold to Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
(which had already subleased and moved into the facility in 2003). Both of these locations were award-winning designs by Studios Architecture.
In April 2008, SGI re-entered the visualization market with the SGI Virtu
SGI Virtu is a computer product line from Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performanc ...
range of visualization servers and workstations, which were re-badged systems from BOXX Technologies based on Intel Xeon
Xeon (; ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same archite ...
or AMD Opteron
Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64). It was released on April 22, 2003, with the ''SledgeHammer'' co ...
processors and Nvidia Quadro
Quadro was Nvidia's brand for graphics cards intended for use in workstations running professional computer-aided design (CAD), computer-generated imagery (CGI), digital content creation (DCC) applications, scientific calculations and machine l ...
graphics chipsets, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial Linux distribution developed by Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version for x86-64. Fedora Linux and ...
, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop computers.
Its major ve ...
or Windows Compute Cluster Server
Windows Server 2003, codenamed "Whistler Server", is the sixth major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft and the first server version to be released under the Windows Server brand name. It is part of the Windows NT ...
.
Final bankruptcy and acquisition by Rackable Systems
In December 2008, SGI received a delisting notification from NASDAQ
The Nasdaq Stock Market (; National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the U.S. by volume, and ranked second on the list ...
, as its market value had been below the minimum $35 million requirement for 10 consecutive trading days, and also did not meet NASDAQ's alternative requirements of a minimum stockholders' equity of $2.5 million or annual net income from continuing operations of $500,000 or more.
On April 1, 2009, SGI filed for Chapter 11 again, and announced that it would sell substantially all of its assets to Rackable Systems for $25 million. The sale, ultimately for $42.5 million, was finalized on May 11, 2009; at the same time, Rackable announced their adoption of "Silicon Graphics International" as their global name and brand. The Bankruptcy Court scheduled continuing proceedings and hearings for June 3 and 24, 2009, and July 22, 2009.[ (selected items from the court docket, Case # 09-11701, United States Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, Judge Martin Glenn)]
After the Rackable acquisition, ''Vizworld'' magazine publishe
a series of six articles that chronicle the downfall of SGI.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas. It is a business-focused organization which works in servers, storage, networking, containerization software and ...
acquired Silicon Graphics International in November 2016, which allowed HPE to place the SGI Pleiades
The Pleiades (), also known as Seven Sisters and Messier 45 (M45), is an Asterism (astronomy), asterism of an open cluster, open star cluster containing young Stellar classification#Class B, B-type stars in the northwest of the constellation Tau ...
, a TOP500
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...
supercomputer at NASA Ames Research Center, in its portfolio.
Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc. era
During Silicon Graphics Inc.'s second bankruptcy phase, it was renamed to Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc.(GPHI) in June 2009.
In 2010, GPHI announced it had won a significant favorable ruling in its litigation with ATI Technologies and AMD in June 2010, following the patent lawsuit originally filed during the Silicon Graphics, Inc. era. Following the 2008 appeal by ATI over the validity of ('327) and Silicon Graphics Inc's voluntary dismissal of the ('376) patent from the lawsuit, the Federal Circuit upheld the jury verdict on the validity of GPHI's U.S. Patent No. 6,650,327, and furthermore found that AMD had lost its right to challenge patent validity in future proceedings. On January 31, 2011, the District Court entered an order that permits AMD to pursue its invalidity affirmative defense at trial and does not permit SGI to accuse AMD's Radeon R700 series of graphics products of infringement in this case. On April 18, 2011, GPHI and AMD had entered into a confidential Settlement and License Agreement that resolved this litigation matter for an immaterial amount and that provides immunity under all GPHI patents for alleged infringement by AMD products, including components, software and designs. On April 26, 2011, the Court entered an order granting the parties' agreed motion for dismissal and final judgment.
In November 2011, GPHI filed another patent infringement lawsuit against Apple Inc. in Delaware involving more patents than their original patent infringement case against Apple last November, for alleged violation of U.S. patents 6,650,327 ('327), ('145) and ('881).
In 2012, GPHI filed lawsuit against Apple, Sony, HTC Corp, LG Electronics Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., Research in Motion Ltd. for allegedly violating patent relating to a computer graphics process that turns text and images into pixels to be displayed on screens. Affected devices include Apple iPhone, HTC EVO4G, LG Thrill, Research in Motion Torch, Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy S II, and Sony Xperia Play smartphones.
* - 1998 Display system having floating point rasterization and floating point ..
* - 2002 System, method, and computer program product for near-real time load ..
* - 1998 Large area wide aspect ratio flat panel monitor having high resolution for ..
* - 1995 Data processing system for processing one and two parcel instructions
Technology
Motorola 680x0-based systems
SGI's first generation products, starting with the IRIS (Integrated Raster Imaging System) 1000 series of high-performance graphics terminals, were based on the Motorola 68000
The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...
family of microprocessor
A microprocessor is a computer processor (computing), processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, a ...
s. The later IRIS 2000 and 3000 models developed into full UNIX
Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
workstation
A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...
s.
IRIS 1000 series
The first entries in the 1000 series (models 1000 and 1200, introduced in 1984) were graphics terminals, peripherals to be connected to a general-purpose computer such as a Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...
VAX
VAX (an acronym for virtual address extension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The V ...
, to provide graphical raster display abilities. They used 8 MHz Motorola 68000 CPUs with of RAM and had no disk drive
Disc or disk may refer to:
* Disk (mathematics), a two dimensional shape, the interior of a circle
* Disk storage
* Optical disc
* Floppy disk
Music
* Disc (band), an American experimental music band
* ''Disk'' (album), a 1995 EP by Moby
Other ...
s. They booted over the network[ (via an Excelan EXOS/101 Ethernet card) from their controlling computer. They used the "PM1" CPU board, which was a variant of the board that was used in ]Stanford University
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
's SUN workstation
The SUN workstation was a modular computer system designed at Stanford University in the early 1980s. It became the seed technology for many commercial products, including the original workstations from Sun Microsystems.
History
In 1979 Xerox do ...
and later in the Sun-1
Sun-1 was the first generation of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in May 1982. These were based on a CPU board designed by Andy Bechtolsheim while he was a graduate student at Stanford University an ...
workstation from Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...
. The graphics system was composed of the GF1 frame buffer
A framebuffer (frame buffer, or sometimes framestore) is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Mode ...
, the UC3 "Update Controller", DC3 "Display Controller", and the BP2 bitplane. The 1000-series machines were designed around the Multibus standard.
Later 1000-series machines, the 1400 and 1500, ran at 10 MHz and had 1.5 MB of RAM. The 1400 had a 72 MB ST-506
The ST-506 and ST-412 (sometimes written ST506 and ST412) were early hard disk drive products introduced by Seagate in 1980 and 1981 respectively, that later became construed as hard disk drive interfaces: the ST-506 disk interface and the ST- ...
disk drive, while the 1500 had a 474 MB SMD-based disk drive with a Xylogics 450 disk controller. They may have used the PM2 CPU and PM2M1 RAM board from the 2000 series.[ The usual monitor for the 1000 series ran at 30 Hz ]interlaced
Interlaced video (also known as interlaced scan) is a technique for doubling the perceived frame rate of a video display without consuming extra bandwidth. The interlaced signal contains two fields of a video frame captured consecutively. Th ...
. Six beta-test units of the 1400 workstation were produced, and the first production unit (SGI's first commercial computer) was shipped to Carnegie-Mellon University's Electronic Imaging Laboratory in 1984.
IRIS 2000 and 3000 series
SGI rapidly developed its machines into workstations with its second product line — the IRIS 2000 series, first released in August 1985. SGI began using the UNIX System V
Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
. There were five models in two product ranges, the 2000/2200/2300/2400/2500 range which used 68010 CPUs (the PM2 CPU module), and the later "Turbo" systems, the 2300T, 2400T and 2500T, which had 68020s (the IP2 CPU module). All used the Excelan EXOS/201 Ethernet card, the same graphics hardware (GF2 Frame Buffer, UC4 Update Controller, DC4 Display Controller, BP3 Bitplane). Their main differences were the CPU, RAM, and Weitek
Weitek Corporation was an American Microprocessor, chip-design company that originally focused on floating-point units for a number of commercial Central processing unit, CPU designs. During the early to mid-1980s, Weitek designs could be found ...
Floating Point Accelerator boards, disk controllers and disk drives (both ST-506
The ST-506 and ST-412 (sometimes written ST506 and ST412) were early hard disk drive products introduced by Seagate in 1980 and 1981 respectively, that later became construed as hard disk drive interfaces: the ST-506 disk interface and the ST- ...
and SMD were available). These could be upgraded, for example from a 2400 to a 2400T. The 2500 and 2500T had a larger chassis, a standard 6' 19" EIA rack with space at the bottom for two SMD disk drives weighing approximately each. The non-Turbo models used the Multibus for the CPU to communicate with the floating point accelerator, while the Turbos added a ribbon cable dedicated for this. 60 Hz monitors were used for the 2000 series.
The height of the machines using Motorola CPUs was reached with the IRIS 3000 series (models 3010/3020/3030 and 3110/3115/3120/3130, the 30s both being full-size rack machines). They used the same graphics subsystem and Ethernet as the 2000s, but could also use up to 12 "geometry engines", the first widespread use of hardware graphics accelerators. The standard monitor was a 19" 60 Hz non-interlaced unit with a tilt/swivel base; 19" 30 Hz interlaced and a 15" 60 Hz non-interlaced (with tilt/swivel base) were also available.
The IRIS 3130 and its smaller siblings were impressive for the time, being complete UNIX
Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
workstations. The 3130 was powerful enough to support a complete 3D animation and rendering package without mainframe support. With large capacity hard drives by standards of the day (two 300 MB drives), streaming tape and Ethernet, it could be the centerpiece of an animation operation.
The line was formally discontinued in November 1989, with about 3,500 systems shipped of all 2000 and 3000 models combined.
RISC era
With the introduction of the IRIS 4D series, SGI switched to MIPS microprocessors. These machines were more powerful and came with powerful on-board floating-point capability. As 3D graphics became more popular in television and film during this time, these systems were responsible for establishing much of SGI's reputation.
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
IRIX (, ) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS architecture, MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD extensio ...
. 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 October 1991, MIPS announced the first commercially available 64-bit
In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...
microprocessor, the R4000
The R4000 is a microprocessor developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implements the MIPS III instruction set architecture (ISA). Officially announced on 1 October 1991, it was one of the first 64-bit microprocessors and the first MIPS III imp ...
. SGI used the R4000 in its Crimson
Crimson is a rich, deep red color, inclining to purple.
It originally meant the color of the kermes dye produced from a scale insect, '' Kermes vermilio'', but the name is now sometimes also used as a generic term for slightly bluish-red col ...
workstation. IRIX 6.2 was the first fully 64-bit IRIX release, including 64-bit pointers.
To secure the supply of future generations of MIPS microprocessors (the 64-bit R4000
The R4000 is a microprocessor developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implements the MIPS III instruction set architecture (ISA). Officially announced on 1 October 1991, it was one of the first 64-bit microprocessors and the first MIPS III imp ...
), SGI acquired the company in 1992 for $333 million[Computer History Museum.]
Silicon Graphics Professional IRIS 4D/50GT
" Retrieved September 19, 2011. and renamed it as MIPS Technologies Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of SGI.
In 1993, Silicon Graphics (SGI) signed a deal with Nintendo
is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto. It develops, publishes, and releases both video games and video game consoles.
The history of Nintendo began when craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi ...
to develop the Reality Coprocessor (RCP) GPU
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...
used in the Nintendo 64
The (N64) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released in Japan on June 23, 1996, in North America on September 29, 1996, and in Europe and Australia on March 1, 1997. As the successor to the Super Nintendo E ...
(N64) video game console. The deal was signed in early 1993, and it was later made public in August of that year. The console itself was later released in 1996. The RCP was developed by SGI's Nintendo Operations department, led by engineer Dr. Wei Yen. In 1997, twenty SGI employees, led by Yen, left SGI and founded ArtX (later acquired by ATI Technologies
ATI Technologies Inc. was a Canadian semiconductor industry, semiconductor technology corporation based in Markham, Ontario, that specialized in the development of graphics processing units and chipsets. Founded in 1985, the company listed pub ...
in 2000).
In 1998, SGI relinquished some ownership of MIPS Technologies, Inc in a Re-IPO, and fully divested itself in 2000.
In the late 1990s, when much of the industry expected the Itanium
Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit computing, 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly dev ...
to replace both CISC and RISC
In electronics and computer science, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer architecture designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a comp ...
architectures in non-embedded computers, SGI announced their intent to phase out MIPS in their systems. Development of new MIPS microprocessors stopped, and the existing R12000 design was extended multiple times until 2003 to provide existing customers more time to migrate to Itanium.
In August 2006, SGI announced the end of production for MIPS/IRIX systems, and by the end of the year MIPS/IRIX products were no longer generally available from SGI.
IRIS GL and OpenGL
Until the second generation Onyx Reality Engine machines, SGI offered access to its high performance 3D graphics subsystems through a proprietary API
An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...
known as ''IRIS Graphics Library'' (IRIS GL
IRIS GL (Integrated Raster Imaging System Graphics Library) is a proprietary graphics API created by Silicon Graphics (SGI) in the early 1980s for producing 2D and 3D computer graphics on their IRIX-based IRIS graphical workstations. Later SGI rem ...
). As more features were added over the years, IRIS GL became harder to maintain and more cumbersome to use. In 1992, SGI decided to clean up and reform IRIS GL and made the bold move of allowing the resulting OpenGL
OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typic ...
API to be cheaply licensed by SGI's competitors, and 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.[ For over 20 years – until the introduction of the Vulkan API] – OpenGL remained the only real-time 3D graphics standard to be portable across a variety of operating systems.[
]
ACE Consortium
SGI was part of the Advanced Computing Environment initiative, formed in the early 1990s with 20 other companies, including Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology, information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compati ...
, Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...
, MIPS Computer Systems
MIPS Tech LLC, formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. and MIPS Technologies, Inc., is an American fabless semiconductor design company that is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of RISC CPU chips based on it. MIP ...
, Groupe Bull
Bull SAS (also known as Groupe Bull, Bull Information Systems, or simply Bull) is a French computer company headquartered in Les Clayes-sous-Bois, in the western suburbs of Paris. The company has also been known at various times as Bull General ...
, Siemens
Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational technology conglomerate. It is focused on industrial automation, building automation, rail transport and health technology. Siemens is the largest engineering company in Europe, and holds the positi ...
, NEC
is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...
, NeTpower, Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
and Santa Cruz Operation
The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (usually known as SCO, pronounced either as individual letters or as a word) was an American software company, based in Santa Cruz, California, that was best known for selling three Unix operating system variants ...
. Its intent was to introduce workstations based on the MIPS architecture
MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies ...
and able to run Windows NT
Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Original ...
and SCO UNIX
Xinuos OpenServer, previously SCO UNIX and SCO Open Desktop (SCO ODT), is a closed source computer operating system developed by Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), later acquired by SCO Group, and now owned by Xinuos. Early versions of OpenServer were ...
. The group produced the Advanced RISC Computing
Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) is a specification promulgated by a defunct consortium of computer manufacturers (the Advanced Computing Environment project), setting forth a standard MIPS RISC-based computer hardware and firmware environment. T ...
(ARC) specification, but began to unravel little more than a year after its formation.
Entertainment industry
For eight consecutive years (1995–2002), all films nominated for an Academy Award
The Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit in film. They are presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in the United States in recognition of excellence ...
for Distinguished Achievement in Visual Effects were created on Silicon Graphics computer systems. The technology was also used in commercials for a host of companies.
An SGI Crimson system with the fsn three-dimensional
In geometry, a three-dimensional space (3D space, 3-space or, rarely, tri-dimensional space) is a mathematical space in which three values (''coordinates'') are required to determine the position (geometry), position of a point (geometry), poi ...
file system navigator appeared in the 1993 movie ''Jurassic Park
''Jurassic Park'', later referred to as ''Jurassic World'', is an American science fiction media franchise created by Michael Crichton, centered on a disastrous attempt to create a theme park of De-extinction#Cloning, cloned dinosaurs. It bega ...
''.
In the movie ''Twister
Twister most commonly refers to a tornado.
Twister or Twisters may also refer to:
Aviation
* Pipistrel Twister, a Slovenian ultralight trike
* Silence Twister, a German homebuilt aircraft design
* Wings of Change Twister, an Austrian paragli ...
'', protagonists can be seen using an SGI laptop computer; however, the unit shown was not an actual working computer, but rather a fake laptop shell built around an SGI Corona LCD flat screen display.
The 1995 film '' Congo'' also features an SGI laptop computer being used by Dr. Ross (Laura Linney
Laura Leggett Linney (born February 5, 1964) is an American actress. She is the recipient of several awards, including two Golden Globe Awards and four Primetime Emmy Awards, and has been nominated for three Academy Awards and five Tony Awards. ...
) to communicate via satellite to TraviCom HQ.
The purple, lowercased "sgi" logo can be seen at the beginning of the opening credits of the HBO
Home Box Office (HBO) is an American pay television service, which is the flagship property of namesake parent-subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is based a ...
series ''Silicon Valley'', before being taken down and replaced by the Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
logo as the intro graphics progress. Google leased the former SGI buildings in 2003 for their headquarters in Mountain View, CA until they purchased the buildings outright in 2006.
Once inexpensive PCs began to have graphics performance close to the more expensive specialized graphical workstations which were SGI's core business, SGI shifted its focus to high performance servers for digital video
Digital video is an electronic representation of moving visual images (video) in the form of encoded digital data. This is in contrast to analog video, which represents moving visual images in the form of analog signals. Digital video comprises ...
and the Web. Many SGI graphics engineers left to work at other computer graphics companies such as ATI and Nvidia
Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...
, contributing to the PC 3D graphics revolution.
Free software
SGI was a promoter of free software
Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...
, supporting several projects such as Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
and Samba
Samba () is a broad term for many of the rhythms that compose the better known Brazilian music genres that originated in the Afro-Brazilians, Afro Brazilian communities of Bahia in the late 19th century and early 20th century, It is a name or ...
, and opening some of its own previously proprietary code such as the XFS
XFS is a high-performance 64-bit journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) in 1993. It was the default file system in SGI's IRIX operating system starting with its version 5.3. XFS was ported to the Linux kernel in 2001; a ...
filesystem and the Open64 compiler.
SGI was also important in its contribution to the C++ Standard Template Library
The Standard Template Library (STL) is a software library originally designed by Alexander Stepanov for the C++ programming language that influenced many parts of the C++ Standard Library. It provides four components called ''algorithms'', '' ...
(STL) with many useful extensions in the MIT-like licensed SGI STL implementation. The extension keeps being carried by the direct descendant STLport and GNU's libstdc++
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a collection of compilers from the GNU Project that support various programming languages, hardware architectures, and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes GCC as free software ...
.
Acquisition of Alias, Wavefront, Cray and Intergraph
In 1995, SGI purchased Alias Research, Kroyer Films, and Wavefront Technologies
Wavefront Technologies was a computer graphics company that developed and sold computer animation, animation software used in Cinema of the United States, Hollywood film, motion pictures and other industries. It was founded in 1984, in Santa Barba ...
in a deal totaling approximately $500 million and merged the companies into Alias, Wavefront. In June 2004 SGI sold the business, later renamed to Alias/Wavefront, to the private equity investment firm Accel-KKR KKR may refer to:
* KKR & Co., a global investment firm
*Kolkata Knight Riders, an Indian Premier League franchise
* Rheinsberg Nuclear Power Plant (), first nuclear power plant in the former East Germany
* Kalkara, Malta, postal code KKR
*Kir-Bala ...
for $57.5 million. In October 2005, Autodesk
Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that provides software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquarte ...
announced that it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Alias for $182 million in cash.
In February 1996, SGI purchased the well-known supercomputer
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...
manufacturer Cray Research
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed i ...
for $740 million, 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 Cray Business Systems Division
Floating Point Systems, Inc. (FPS), was a Beaverton, Oregon vendor of attached array processors and minisupercomputers. The company was founded in 1970 by former Tektronix engineer Norm Winningstad, with partners Tom Prints, Frank Bouton and Rob ...
, responsible for the CS6400 SPARC/Solaris server, to Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...
for an undisclosed amount (acknowledged later by a Sun executive to be "significantly less than $100 million"). Many of the Cray T3E
The Cray T3E was Cray Research's second-generation massively parallel supercomputer architecture, launched in late November 1995. The first T3E was installed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in 1996. Like the previous Cray T3D, it was a fu ...
engineers designed and developed the SGI Altix and NUMAlink technology. SGI sold the Cray brand and product lines to Tera Computer Company
The Tera Computer Company was a manufacturer of high-performance computing software and hardware, founded in 1987 in Washington, D.C., and moved 1988 to Seattle, Washington, by James Rottsolk and Burton Smith. The company's first supercomputer pr ...
on March 31, 2000, for $35 million plus one million shares. 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 (for a rumored $100 million), and rebadged them as SGI systems. The product line was discontinued in June 2001.
SGI Visual Workstations
Another attempt by SGI in the late 1990s to introduce its own family of Intel-based workstations running Windows NT
Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Original ...
or Red Hat Linux
Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004.
Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Red Hat published the first non-beta release ...
(see also SGI Visual Workstation
SGI Visual Workstation is a series of workstation computers that are designed and manufactured by SGI. Unlike its other product lines, which used the 64-bit MIPS RISC architecture, the line used Intel Pentium II and III processors and shipped ...
) proved to be a financial disaster, and shook customer confidence in SGI's commitment to its own MIPS-based line.
Switch to Itanium
In 1998, SGI announced that future generations of its machines would be based not on their own MIPS processors, but the upcoming "super-chip" from Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
, code-named "Merced" and later called Itanium
Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit computing, 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly dev ...
. Funding for its own high-end processors was reduced, and it was planned that the R10000
The R10000, code-named "T5", is a RISC microprocessor implementation of the MIPS IV instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by MIPS Technologies, Inc. (MTI), then a division of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). The chief designers are Chris Ro ...
would be the last MIPS mainstream processor. MIPS Technologies
MIPS Tech LLC, formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. and MIPS Technologies, Inc., is an American Fabless semiconductor company, fabless semiconductor design company that is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of Re ...
would focus entirely on the embedded market, where it was 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 would have nowhere near the performance originally expected. As the production delays increased, MIPS' existing R10000-based machines grew increasingly uncompetitive. It was eventually forced to introduce faster MIPS processors, the R12000, R14000 and R16000, which were used in a series of models from 1999 through 2006.
SGI's first Itanium-based system was the short-lived SGI 750 workstation, launched in 2001. SGI's MIPS-based systems were not to be superseded until the launch of the Itanium 2
Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and I ...
-based Altix
Altix is a line of server computers and supercomputers produced by Silicon Graphics (and successor company Silicon Graphics International), based on Intel processors. It succeeded the MIPS/IRIX-based Origin 3000 servers.
History
The line was ...
servers and Prism
PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD . PRISM collects stored internet ...
workstations some time later. Unlike the MIPS systems, which ran IRIX
IRIX (, ) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS architecture, MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD extensio ...
, the Itanium systems used SuSE Linux Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop computers.
Its major ve ...
with SGI enhancements as their operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
. SGI used Transitive Corporation's QuickTransit
QuickTransit was a cross-platform virtualization program developed by Transitive Corporation. It allowed software compiled for one specific processor and operating system combination to be executed on a different processor and/or operating sys ...
software to allow their old MIPS/IRIX applications to run (in emulation) on the new Itanium/Linux platform.
In the server market, the Itanium 2-based Altix eventually replaced the MIPS-based Origin product line. In the workstation market, the switch to Itanium was not completed before SGI exited the market.
The Altix was the most powerful computer in the world in 2006, assuming that a "computer" is defined as a collection of hardware running under a single instance of an operating system. The Altix had 512 Itanium processors running under a single instance of Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
. A cluster of 20 machines was then the eighth-fastest supercomputer
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...
. All faster supercomputers were clusters, but none have as many FLOPS
Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...
per machine. However, more recent supercomputers are very large clusters of machines that are individually less capable. SGI acknowledged this and in 2007 moved away from the "massive NUMA
Numa or NUMA may refer to:
* Non-uniform memory access (NUMA), in computing
Places
* Numa Falls, a waterfall in Kootenay National Park, Canada
* 15854 Numa, a main-belt asteroid
United States
* Numa, Indiana
* Numa, Iowa
* Numa, Oklahoma
* ...
" model to clusters.
Switch to Xeon
Although SGI continued to market Itanium-based machines, its more recent machines were based on the Intel Xeon
Xeon (; ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same archite ...
processor. The first Altix XE systems were relatively low-end machines, but by December 2006 the XE systems were more capable than the Itanium machines by some measures (e.g., power consumption in FLOPS/W, density in FLOPS/m3, cost/FLOPS). The XE1200 and XE1300 servers used a cluster architecture. This was a departure from the pure NUMA architectures of the earlier Itanium and MIPS servers.
In June 2007, SGI announced the Altix ICE 8200, a blade-based Xeon system with up to 512 Xeon cores per rack. An Altix ICE 8200 installed at New Mexico Computing Applications Center (with 14336 processors) ranked at number 3 on the TOP500 list of November 2007.
User base and core market
Conventional wisdom holds that SGI's core market has traditionally been Hollywood
Hollywood usually refers to:
* Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California
* Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States
Hollywood may also refer to:
Places United States
* Hollywood District (disambiguation)
* Hollywood ...
visual effects studios. In fact, SGI's largest revenue
In accounting, revenue is the total amount of income generated by the sale of product (business), goods and services related to the primary operations of a business.
Commercial revenue may also be referred to as sales or as turnover. Some compan ...
has always been generated by government and defense applications, energy, and scientific and technical computing. In one case Silicon Graphics' largest single sale ever was to the United States Postal Service
The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or simply the Postal Service, is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the executive branch of the federal governmen ...
. SGI's servers powered an artificial intelligence program to mechanically read, tag and sort the mail (hand-written and block) at a number of USPS's key mail centers. The rise of cheap yet powerful commodity workstations running Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
, Microsoft Windows, Windows and Mac OS X, and the availability of diverse professional software for them, effectively pushed SGI out of the visual effects industry in all but the most niche markets.
High-end server market
SGI continued to enhance its line of servers (including some supercomputer
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...
s) based on the SN architecture. SN, for Scalable Node, is a technology developed by SGI in the mid-1990s that uses Non-Uniform Memory Access#Cache coherent NUMA (ccNUMA), cache-coherent non-uniform memory access (cc-NUMA). In an SN system, processors, memory, and a bus- and memory-controller are coupled together into an entity called a node, usually on a single circuit board. Nodes are connected by a high-speed interconnect called NUMAlink (originally marketed as CrayLink). There is no internal bus, and instead access between processors, memory, and I/O devices is done through a switched fabric of links and router (computing), routers.
Thanks to the cache coherence of the distributed shared memory, SN systems scale along several axes at once: as CPU count increases, so does memory capacity, I/O capacity, and system bisection bandwidth. This allows the combined memory of all the nodes to be accessed under a single Operating system, OS image using standard shared-memory synchronization methods. This makes an SN system far easier to program and able to achieve higher sustained-to-peak performance than non-cache-coherent systems like conventional cluster computing, 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 under the product name SGI Origin 2000, Origin 2000. Based on the MIPS R10000
The R10000, code-named "T5", is a RISC microprocessor implementation of the MIPS IV instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by MIPS Technologies, Inc. (MTI), then a division of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). The chief designers are Chris Ro ...
processor, it scaled from 2 to 128 processors and a smaller version, the SGI Origin 200, Origin 200 (SN-00), scaled from 1 to 4. Later enhancements enabled systems of as large as 512 processors.
The second generation system, originally called SN-1 but later SN-MIPS, was released in July 2000, as the Origin 3000. It scaled from 4 to 512 processors, and 1,024-processor configurations were delivered by special order to some customers. A smaller, less scalable implementation followed, called Origin 300.
In November 2002, SGI announced a repackaging of its SN system, under the name Origin 3900. It quadrupled the processor area density of the SN-MIPS system, from 32 up to 128 processors per rack while moving to a "fat tree" interconnect topology.
In January 2003, SGI announced a variant of the SN platform called the Altix, Altix 3000 (internally called SN-IA). It used Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
Itanium
Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit computing, 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly dev ...
2 processors and ran the Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
operating system kernel. At the time it was released, it was the world's most scalable Linux-based computer, supporting up to 64 processors in a single system node. Nodes could be connected using the same NUMAlink technology to form what SGI predictably termed "superclusters".
In February 2004, SGI announced general support for 128 processor nodes to be followed by 256 and 512 processor versions that year.
In April 2004, SGI announced the sale of its Alias software business for approximately $57 million.
In October 2004, SGI built the supercomputer Columbia (supercomputer), Columbia, which broke the world record for computer speed, for the NASA Ames Research Center. It was a cluster of 20 SGI Altix, Altix supercomputers each with 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors running Linux, and achieved sustained speed of 42.7 1000000000000 (number), trillion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS, teraflops), easily topping Japan's famed Earth Simulator's record of 35.86 teraflops. (A week later, IBM's upgraded Blue Gene/L clocked in at 70.7 teraflops.)
In July 2006, SGI announced an SGI Altix 4700 system with 1,024 processors and 4 terabyte, TB of memory running a single Linux system image.
Hardware products
Some 68k- and MIPS-based models were also rebadged by other vendors, including Control Data Corporation, CDC, Tandem Computers, Prime Computer and Siemens-Nixdorf.
SGI Onyx and SGI Indy series systems were used for video game development for the Nintendo 64
The (N64) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released in Japan on June 23, 1996, in North America on September 29, 1996, and in Europe and Australia on March 1, 1997. As the successor to the Super Nintendo E ...
.
Motorola 68k-based systems
* SGI IRIS, IRIS 1000 series graphics terminals (diskless 1000/1200, 1400/1500 with disks)
* SGI IRIS, IRIS 2000 series workstations (2000/2200/2300/2400/2500 non-Turbo and 2300T/2400T/2500T "Turbo" models)
* SGI IRIS, IRIS 3000 series workstations (3010/3020/3030 and 3110/3115/3120/3130)
MIPS-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)
* SGI Crimson, IRIS Crimson (deskside workstation/server)
* SGI Indigo, IRIS Indigo series (Indigo, Indigo R4000)
* SGI Indigo2, Indigo² series (Indigo², Power Indigo², Indigo² R10000)
* SGI Indy, Indy workstation
* SGI O2, O2/O2+ workstation
* SGI Octane, Octane workstation
* SGI Octane2, Octane2 workstation
* SGI Fuel, Fuel entry-level workstation
* SGI Tezro, Tezro high-end workstation
Servers
* SGI Indy, Challenge S (desktop server)
* SGI Challenge M, Challenge M/Power Challenge M (desktop server)
* SGI Challenge, Challenge DM (deskside server)
* SGI Challenge, Challenge L/Power Challenge/Challenge 10000 (deskside server)
* SGI Challenge, Challenge XL/Power Challenge XL (rack server)
* SGI Origin 200, Origin 200 entry-level server
* SGI Origin 2000, Origin 2000 high-end server
* SGI Origin 300, Origin 300 entry-level server
* SGI Origin 350, Origin 350 mid-range server
* SGI Origin 3000, Origin 3000 high-end server
Visualization
* SGI Onyx, Onyx (deskside and rackmount systems)
* SGI Onyx, Power Onyx (deskside and rackmount systems)
* SGI Onyx, Onyx 10000 (deskside and rackmount systems)
* SGI Onyx2, Onyx2 (deskside and rackmount systems)
* Onyx 350 (rackmount systems)
* Onyx 3000 (rackmount systems)
* Onyx4 (rackmount systems)
* SkyWriter (rackmount systems)
Intel IA-32-based systems
Workstations
* SGI Visual Workstation, SGI 320 Visual Workstation (Windows NT)
* SGI Visual Workstation, SGI 540 Visual Workstation (Windows NT)
* SGI Visual Workstation, SGI 230 Workstation (Linux/Windows NT)
* SGI Visual Workstation, SGI 330 Workstation (Linux/Windows NT)
* SGI Visual Workstation, SGI 550 Workstation (Linux/Windows NT)
* SGI Zx10 Visual Workstation (Windows)
* SGI Zx10 VE Visual Workstation (Windows)
Servers
* 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
* SGI Altix 330, Altix 330 entry-level server
* SGI Altix 350, Altix 350 mid-range server
* SGI Altix 3000, Altix 3000 high-end server
* Altix 450 mid-range server
* SGI Altix 4000, Altix 4000 high-end server, capable of up to 2048 CPUs
* Prism
PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD . PRISM collects stored internet ...
(deskside and rackmount systems)
Intel/AMD x86-64 systems
* Altix XE210 server
* Altix XE240 server
* Altix XE310 server
* Altix XE1200 cluster
* Altix XE1300 cluster
* Altix ICE 8200
* Altix ICE 8400
* SGI Virtu, Virtu VN200 visualization node
* SGI Virtu, Virtu VS100 workstation
* SGI Virtu, Virtu VS200 workstation
* SGI Virtu, Virtu VS300 workstation
* SGI Virtu, Virtu VS350 workstation
FPGA-based accelerators
* RASC Application Acceleration
Storage systems
* InfiniteStorage 10000
* InfiniteStorage 6700
* InfiniteStorage 4600
* InfiniteStorage 4500
* InfiniteStorage 4000
* InfiniteStorage 350
* InfiniteStorage 220
* InfiniteStorage 120
* SGI Infinite Data Cluster
Storage solutions
* InfiniteStorage NEXIS 500
* InfiniteStorage NEXIS 2000
* InfiniteStorage NEXIS 7000
* InfiniteStorage NEXIS 7000-HA
* InfiniteStorage NEXIS 9000
* InfiniteStorage Server 3500
Displays
* SGI 1600SW, 1600SW, a multi-award-winning wide screen video monitor
Accelerator cards
* IrisVision, one of the first 3D graphics accelerators for high-end PCs
Other
* Espressigo, Espresso maker in collaboration with Gaggia
See also
* SCO and SGI
* Rick Belluzzo, SGI CEO from January 1998 to August 1999
* Silicon Graphics Image
References
External links
*
Whatever Happened to SGI?
SGI timeline
Irix Network - information, forums, and archive for SGI machines
TechPubs Wiki for SGI and IRIX
Silicon Graphics User Group
{{Authority control
Silicon Graphics,
1981 establishments in California
2009 disestablishments in California
American companies established in 1981
Companies based in Mountain View, California
Companies based in Silicon Valley
Companies based in Sunnyvale, California
Companies formerly listed on the New York Stock Exchange
Companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2006
Companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009
Computer companies established in 1981
Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Defunct computer companies based in California
Defunct computer companies of the United States
Defunct computer hardware companies
Defunct computer systems companies
Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States
Defunct software companies of the United States
Design companies established in 1981
Electronics companies established in 1981
Graphics hardware companies
Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Technology companies disestablished in 2009
Technology companies established in 1981