There's probably young-uns here who don't know who Silicon Graphics is or what they did.<p>Silicon Graphics sold proprietary unix systems that were very heavily optimized for doing graphics rendering. Their workstations sold from $10,000 on the low end to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were expensive, but if you wanted to do real time 3D stuff for animation, visual effects, CAD applications, or any type of graphics modelling, they were the only game in town, and you pretty much <i>had</i> to use their boxes.<p>Their products were amazing in their time, and they pushed the state of the art in computer graphics hardware for years. But, between the ability to create relatively cheap linux based render farms with commodity hardware on the server side, and ATI/NVidia creating great plug in graphics cards for PC's/Workstations, SGI wasn't able to compete. They slowly died and faded away into obsolescence. Some of the last remnants of their technology that people interact with frequently is the OpenGL api.<p>Silicon Graphics, you will be missed.
SGI killed themselves, just took a long time to die.<p>They had geniuses working in their graphics side, and when they decided some 15 years ago that "Unix was dead" and WinNT was the future, those geniuses left for Nvidia and other places. SGI never recovered and ended up reselling supercomputers with ATI cards in them.
Damn, SGI is right there with Digital in the category of amazing companies that brought us amazing advances and didn't deserver the fate that befell them.<p>...looks like Sun might be the next member of that club...
I worked there as an intern back in 2000. I did chip circuit verification, and saw that they had roadmaps for their future products up to around 2006. The group I was in was designing server chips and their interconnects to make clusters of high performance super computers.<p>I recall that they knew Intel was making dual and quadcore chips that would kill what they were doing, but had no solution how to turn the ship around.<p>It's too bad. There were some solid engineers there, especially the ones that came from Cray.
Giving up IRIX for WinNT? Well. Death to the unbelievers I say. I never forgot the shock when they had those ads with ther PeeCees in the computer magazines. Up until that point SGI and SUN where kind of the good guys to me.<p>Now, how could they have done it differently? I'd say: build up the lead in gaming consoles and developer workstations they had ad the time. IRIX/MIPS had also some technical advantages over Linux-Clusters in some niches like military simulations. They could have become some sort of NVidia in our days. Does any one has a more qualified strategy / commentary about SGI's demise in the markets to offer? Thanks.