I’ve been waiting for an official response from SGI about the recent elimination of their graphics division, and just got word that there won’t be one aside from the most recent blog post over at the SGI site. Here’s a few choice quotes from it:
SGI’s mission focuses our engineering at the extremes of scale, speed, power, density, and latency. SGI customers use our solutions for many diverse applications: strategic science, national defense, modeling climate change, designing safer, more energy efficient cars, powering the Internet, to visual computing.
….
SGI has a long and successful history of helping our customers advance at the key junctures of “technology shift.” We have helped customers migrate from custom MIPS-based CPUs to Itanium and then to 64-bit x86 processing, from UNIX/IRIX to standard Linux, and now, to GPU technology.
….
This is why we are focused on working closely with nVidia and ATI/AMD and Intel many-core Larrabee, integrating their advanced graphics technology into our core platforms versus writing software to replace the GPU. When speed truly matters, put it in hardware.
So there you have it. Without saying it directly, they essentially admit they are going to begin working with nVidia, Intel, and AMD on integrating their graphics technology into future systems, and abandon their own internal efforts. It’s a smart move from a business perspective, but I’m still saddened that SGI decided to exit the graphics market entirely rather than innovate on something new.
As SGI started to sink, I thought they should have gone back to their roots of high performance graphics. Essentially, nVidia is what SGI should have been.
Also, SGI had one of the earliest working video streams at SIGGRAPH ’95 transmitting between their booth and truck.
@morgs
Well, if you read What Led to the Fall of SGI:Chapter 2, you’ll see they did attempt to catch the consumer market a few times, but they were always really overpriced and underpowered..
They totally over looked the consumer market. Same with Evans & Sutherland and Martin Marietta. Maybe their directors weren’t gamers.
Wow, end of an era. A company that rocked the world with groundbreaking graphics has flicked the switch on what started an endless chain of movies, commercials, and TV shows using 3D graphics. Without the plethora of advancements at SGI, the movie and TV industry would be completely different right now.
R.I.P. SGI, you are already missed.