hey! the old sgi is coming back! (I think)

[dpopiz]

don't you remember a few years ago when silicon graphics made us all cry?
how they ditched all their amazing legendary proprietary stuff and started making PCs with their logo on them?
and how they ditched their old awesome logo and changed their name to sgi (servers, graphics, internet)?

well, I just happened to visit their website and they don't have any PC's listed on their workstations page, but instead 3 beautiful MIPS machines. also, they're using the "silicon graphics" name again and using the old logo in some cases


is this old news? did I miss something? anyway, I'm happy. they were about to go bankrupt before they started making PCs a few years ago, but I guess they realized that that would just make them go bankrupt more quickly

 

[DerMonkeyhauser]

It's been a while since SGI decided to go back to the basics. As far as I can remember, their last IA32 workstations and servers were based on P3 chips (SGI 1100 and 1200 servers, 320 and 540 workstations). They've gone back with the MIPS/IRIX line for good now (I hope) for their workstation products. They do have a Linux/Itanium server line, but that's mostly designed towards huge number crunching clusters for scientific computing (which makes sense - Itanium is good at running one thread per processor really fast, and not much else, while their MIPS stuff has always been huge on I/O bandwidth and multiprocessing). Personally, I wouldn't mind picking up a Fuel or an Onyx4 to run Maya on, but I can't afford either of those; I'll have to stick with my Indy.

Basically, if you're doing highend digital content creation or CAD, and you need the power of SGI workstations, you'll already know it, and probably will already have them installed and running at your site. They're no longer trying to sell to everybody; they know exactly what their market is (and has always been) and are sticking to it. (The only exception is that of branching out into the clusters for scientific computing, though they seem to be doing very well there.) They don't have to play the MHz game anymore (if you've ever used an SGI computer, you'll know that it blows a normal PC out of the water on large datasets). They don't have to worry about competing in an already-overcrowded market with razor-thin margins. It's probably the best business decision they've made, deciding to get back out of the PC market.