Silicon Graphics To Be Delisted From NYSE 257
Dan Linder writes "Starting Monday, November 7th, Silicon Graphics will be delisted from the NYSE. The future of the graphics and supercomputing former-heavyweight has never been less certain. This is especially unfortunate given their ongoing commitment to Linux and other open-source projects." From the article: "The company's stock, which once traded at $50 per share, fell below NYSE's minimum standard for continued listing earlier this year. The move comes as little surprise. The company received a warning from the NYSE in May, when its share price dropped below the $1 barrier. Although it had dipped into sub-$1 territory in late 2001 and again in late 2002, the price on both occasions recovered within a month or two. "
Too bad about SGI (Score:4, Interesting)
reverse split (Score:1, Interesting)
NASDAQ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Consequences of delisting? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Too bad about SGI (Score:3, Interesting)
They tried, haven't you heard of the SGI 320 series, relativly nice machines, but they just got slaughtered by dell et al.
If SGI go it will mean that large scale SMP is essentially dead, I believe that they're the only people other then IBM doing systems > 64 CPU's at the moment, and IBM don't scale all the way up to 512 CPU's.
But I still love my pair of SGI trinitrons on my desk, the best monitors I've ever used, and that includes some of the best LCD's money can buy.
OT: Is slashdot broken again? (Score:1, Interesting)
Example here [imageshack.us]
Too ahead of it's time? (Score:5, Interesting)
OpenGL [opengl.org] - a very important 3D API
The Standard Template Library [sgi.com]
VRML [web3d.org] which gave rise to X3D Open [coin3d.org] Inventor [tgs.com] which is a C++ wrapper around OpenGL.
Pretty purple boxen that were great in their day.
It seems that these came out years before the average user could really leverage them - years before anyone (including SGI it seems) knew what to do with them.
It seems a shame that such a brilliant company could have such a hard time making money. They made the world a better place though, IMHO.
As the saying goes... (Score:2, Interesting)
"There has never been a supercomputing company that the US National Labs couldn't drive out of business"
http://sc05.supercomputing.org/ [supercomputing.org]
What do they have going for them? (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that the market they once had, being high-end graphics workstations, is being eaten up by cheap MS-Windows based systems. They could try redefining themselves, but I not sure what form it could take. While their version of Unix had some nice additions, it was never really a selling point. Their cheapest systems start off at $9000, which more expensive than Apple, and they also have less technology diversity than a company like IBM to help buffer any slow growth of their hardware. Maybe if they offered a very capable $4000 machine, it might help them attract people who might have never considered them before?
BTW CATIA, which is a very important piece of CAD-CAM software in the automotive and aeronautical industry is actually Windows centric, so they benefits of a SGI machine there is zero.
Re:Too ahead of it's time? (Score:3, Interesting)
I still have an old Indigo under my desk (with Elan graphics and everything), and it's a fun toy to pull out every now and again, but it's down to toy status. A niche company just can't compete directly with the massive R&D budget of someone like ATI or nVidia, and there is little you can do with an SGI big iron box these days that you can't do with one of the professional cards from ATI or nVidia for a whole lot less money.
The same thing happened to the processers SGI uses. MIPS processers were designed to be blazing fast and for awhile they were, but then Intel and AMD caught up and MIPS's relatively miniscule product development budget couldn't compete. SGI's desktop machines ended up being slower than contemporary PCs from about 1999 on.
Possibly good news? (Score:2, Interesting)
If SGI are bought out, the purchaser might be more keen to release the necessary information. Alternatively, if SGI are wound up, then the information might effectively revert to the public domain by default {since there will be no party in a position to assert a claim over it}.
{Of course, it's also possible that nVidia are using the egregiuous technique of "crippling" a "£200" graphics card by making a slight change to the firmware [so the driver for the £200 card won't work with it] and selling it for £30. If they can make a profit selling the card for £30, then why should they get away with charging £200 for it? An open-source driver would reveal this blatant deception and dog-in-the-mangerism for what it is.}
Re:Too bad about SGI (Score:5, Interesting)
The story of SGI is the greatest story of... (Score:4, Interesting)
SGI: MAKE A LAPTOP DAMNIT!! (Score:2, Interesting)
sheesh. you guys. MAKE A LAPTOP DAMNIT.
Not supposed to say this... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:NASDAQ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Market cap is only $120 million, Redhat could buy them cash for 20% of their available cash.
Re:Too ahead of it's time? (Score:4, Interesting)
SGI machines are being replaced with cheap x86 clusters running Linux. In the race for GNU domination is this a case of friendly fire?
I Owe My Career To SGI (Score:4, Interesting)
About 15 years ago, I was living in Germany working at a post production studio. The graphics department used SGI hardware along with some amazing software. One Friday evening, as I was finishing up and about to go home, someone stuck their head in the control room where I was cutting some ADR for a film (German voices to replace the English). They asked me if I spoke English. Having lived in the US for about 18 years prior to that, I was able to say I was extremely comfortable with the language. Luckily, I also could speak some "tech". SGI's office was closed for the weekend, and they didn't know how to get any other tech support. I sat down with the manual (in English) and fixed the problem with the machine. From then on, I was hooked.
I started learning about all sorts of UNIX-like systems, but SGI is what saved me. When the bottom dropped out of the market, I was able to take my skills in UNIX and experience with SGI systems (albeit in broadcast facilities), and get a job working as a contractor at the NIH on a project where they had about 10 SGI systems ranging from an Origin 3400 to a little O2. I even have an O2 at home on my network there just so I could break it there before I screwed it up at work. =-)
I've been watching this Titanic go down for several years. It has been a long slow death. Now, I hope someone like Apple picks them up and uses their technologies to help better their own products. I'd love to see the Apple Store with a new listing next to the Xserve; the Gserve. 512 POWER5 (yeah yeah...Intel, blah blah) processors, massive disk array, and three steps to get it working:
1. Deploy it in your server room.
2. ????
3. Arrrrrrrrrrgh...I can't do it!!!
Seriously, I'd love to see something like this. It could really help to boost Apple and keep the "legend" of SGI around for a long time to come.
I wonder if I should be scooping up some SGI stock about now so I can sell it to Apple for the buyout. Now, where did I put that crystal ball?
Re:Even id Software have sold out (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Too bad about SGI (Score:3, Interesting)
SGI non-entity since 1988 (Score:3, Interesting)
SGI never got mind share. Even in the 3D world where they had an opportunity. MacOS briefly had a toe hold that was quickly surpased by PCs in the modelling and rendering world. Both were a fraction of the price of the SGI. Suffices to say desktop Wintel owned the market by 1995.
I don't think its fair to say SGI was the Doyenne of computer graphics systems. I don't think any of the players are bitches and SGI was the alpha female...
Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, after making all these ruinous decisions, Belluzzo immediately quit to take a job at Microsoft. I have never been able to figure out if his job at MS was his reward for scuttling SGI, or if after what he did at SGI, MS was the only company that would hire him! Either way, it was SGI itself (under Belluzzo's leadership) that opened the door for Microsoft to walk into the high-end 3D market. Before Maya was ported to Windows, and before Nvidia came out with their Quadro cards, the idea of doing film-quality animation on a PC (while possible) was not taken seriously by anyone in the industry. 90% of the production tools were SGI-only programs written for Irix.
All in all, I think the market is probably better for it, since now you can buy a $100 motherboard using SGI's crossbar architecture (now called the Nvidia Hypertransport), and $300 graphics cards using SGI graphics processors, instead of having to shell out $10,000 for a workstation. None the less, it is a coffin SGI made for itself.
Re:What do they have going for them? (Score:5, Interesting)
Management decided not to pursue this - they didn't want to cannibalise their workstation sales. The employees shrugged, left, and set up a new company of their own - you may have heard of it, it is called nVidia.
The moral of this story? Never avoid creating a market just to avoid destroying your existing market. If you do, then you will find that you have a competitor who wasn't even in your original market.
Blame the executives, cheer the workers. (Score:1, Interesting)
They never should have given everybody Tag Heuer watches, TJ predicting 50% growth (then hitting 35%), then buying Cray, and then their worst mistake, selling Cray's competing SMP product to Sun which they turned into the E10K. Who made that decision? Ouch.
Re:Too bad about SGI (Score:2, Interesting)
Hey numbnuts! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of... (Score:3, Interesting)
change its name to SGI, stop focusing on graphics, and focus on internet and database servers.
This was the crux of their demise. Their systems no longer had significan tly more processing power than a really nice PC (which cost 1/4 as much as the SGI box). The big advantage they had was a high bandwidth connection to the graphics card, and a filesystem capable of handling high bandwidth read/writes.
None of those advantages really mattered to an internet server that would more than likely (especially at that time) have no more than a 100Mbps pipe to serve. Thus, they were more expensive for no good reason.
They could have switched to Linux, including the release of XFS. Had they done that, but continued to focus on graphics, they would have remained the workstation of choice for any professional video or animation shop, particularly if they had kept up their development efforts on GPU technology. That move would have allowed them to focus on their core competance without giving the farm away.
Instead, they frustrated their best engineers at every turn trying to cram a square peg into a round hole, eventually driving them to form nVidia. Then, they decided they needed to climb into bed with MS. Without their top engineers, they couldn't continue to compete in graphics, and without their OS, they couldn't even pursue vendor lock-in.
All of this underlines the point that no company, no matter how large or small, no matter how advanced or highly esteemed EVER comes out for the better by working with MS. Most eventually die. IBM only survived their 'deal with the devil' because of sheer bulk and momentum.
As for Cray, they had the opportunity to merge the best of both worlds based on technical merit, but instead, allowed political turf wars to turn the whole thing into a disaster. The only reason Cray seems to be recovering is bthat they were spun off again just in time (of course, that doesn't help SGI).