ronutz
← Todos os fabricantes

Linhagem do fabricante

Silicon Graphics - the geometry of Hollywood

Jim Clark's geometry engines rendered Jurassic Park and invented OpenGL; the name ended at HPE in 2016.

SGI built the machines that taught computers to see: geometry pipelines, IRIX on MIPS, and the purple workstations behind a decade of movie magic. Its fall is as instructive as its rise - commodity PCs ate the graphics market SGI created, and OpenGL outlived the company that wrote it.

Founder Jim Clark left in 1994 to co-found Netscape; the company's Cray chapter, its two bankruptcies, and the 2016 HPE acquisition close the loop told in the profile below.

The machines began with the Geometry Engine that Clark and Marc Hannah had designed at Stanford under an ARPA contract, and Clark left his associate professorship in electrical engineering to found the company with seven Stanford graduate students and research staff, Kurt Akeley among them. The encyclopaedia dates the founding to November 1981 in Mountain View; this site carries 1982, the year Clark left Stanford, by a ruling recorded on the citation beside it. The graphics went out through a proprietary library, IRIS GL, until 1992, when SGI reformed it as OpenGL, licensed it cheaply to its own competitors and set up the OpenGL Architecture Review Board to keep the standard: the API outlived the company that wrote it.

IRIX was the operating system, its name a portmanteau of IRIS and UNIX, System V with BSD extensions on MIPS processors. SGI began using the name with release 3.0 in 1988 for the IRIS 4D line, and XFS, like OpenGL, was built for it before being ported to Linux. An SGI Crimson running the fsn three-dimensional file navigator appeared in Jurassic Park in 1993, which is the frame most people remember the company by. The last release, 6.5.30, came on 16 August 2006.

In February 1996 SGI bought Cray Research for $740 million. Then came the moves that, in the encyclopaedia's words, damaged its credibility: the Visual Workstations running Windows NT in the late 1990s, a financial disaster that shook customer confidence in the MIPS line, and the premature announcement of a migration from MIPS to Intel's Itanium, whose systems ran SUSE Linux rather than IRIX. A 2001 Computerworld review found IRIX in a critical state; MIPS and IRIX customers persuaded SGI to keep supporting the platform through 2006.

The end came in two bankruptcies. SGI filed for Chapter 11 on 8 May 2006 and emerged on 17 October 2006; on 6 September 2006 it announced the end of the MIPS and IRIX product lines, production ended on 29 December 2006 with final deliveries in March 2007, and support ran out in December 2013. On 1 April 2009 it filed again and sold substantially all its assets to Rackable Systems, a deal announced at $25 million and finalised on 11 May 2009 for $42.5 million, with Rackable adopting Silicon Graphics International as its name. Hewlett Packard Enterprise completed the acquisition of that company on 1 November 2016 at $7.75 a share, calling it a leader in high performance compute, data analytics and data management, and placing the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA Ames in its portfolio.

Histórias de fundação

1982

Silicon Graphics (SGI)

Mountain View, California · Fundadores: Jim Clark

Jim Clark left Stanford with the Geometry Engine - hardware that did the mathematics of 3D perspective at silicon speed - and founded Silicon Graphics to sell computers that could see. Through the 1980s and 1990s SGI's machines were the exotic sports cars of computing: IRIX on MIPS, purple cases, and price tags to match, rendering everything from fighter-jet simulators to the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. Clark himself left in 1994 to co-found Netscape; the company he built taught the industry graphics, then watched commodity PCs learn the lesson too well.

A linha do tempo

  1. The Geometry Engine

    Clark's Stanford work becomes a company: dedicated silicon for 3D transformation, the ancestor of every GPU pipeline since.

  2. MIPS, and OpenGL

    SGI acquires MIPS Computer Systems to own its processor line - and opens its IRIS GL heritage as OpenGL, the cross-platform graphics API that outlives everything else in this story.

  3. Hollywood's computer

    Jurassic Park's dinosaurs render on SGI machines and the brand becomes shorthand for movie magic - Industrial Light & Magic, and later the effects industry entire, standardize on the purple boxes.

  4. Buying Cray

    SGI acquires Cray Research, briefly uniting Hollywood graphics with supercomputing royalty; the fit never quite works and Cray is sold on in 2000.

  5. The long fall

    Commodity PCs with consumer GPUs - running OpenGL, SGI's own gift - have eaten the workstation market; Chapter 11 arrives in 2006 and again in 2009, when Rackable Systems buys the assets and takes the name.

  6. The name lands at HPE

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise completes the ~$275 million acquisition of SGI in November 2016, folding its high-performance computing line into HPE's - the final flag over a storied name.

    HPE announcement/close per the deal record.

Produtos e soluções carro-chefe

  • IRIS and Onyx workstationsThe graphics supercomputers of the film, science, and defense worlds - IRIX on MIPS at the high-water mark of proprietary Unix.
  • OpenGLThe open graphics API distilled from IRIS GL in 1992 - SGI's most durable product, and it was free.
  • Origin and Altix serversThe NUMA high-performance computing line whose lineage HPE acquired.

Principais inovações

  • The hardware graphics pipelineThe Geometry Engine's transform-and-render model is the conceptual ancestor of the modern GPU - the architecture NVIDIA and the games industry industrialized.
  • Opening the crown jewelsOpenGL standardized 3D graphics across the industry - and, in perfect tragedy, armed the commodity hardware that unmade SGI's business.

Principais mercados

SGI survives as an HPE product heritage and as an aesthetic memory; its real market share lives on in every GPU pipeline and every OpenGL descendant running today.

Posição nos relatórios de analistas

  • The definitive vendor of the visualization-workstation category for as long as the category existed - a textbook case, studied ever since, of a pioneer commoditized by its own standard.
Da própria empresa

Esta empresa não opera mais sob este nome. Hoje faz parte de Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which acquired SGI in 2016.

Fontes