What is Digg?37 Comments
- Dumbledorito, on 11/12/2008, -1/+13I thought SGI kept us safe from the Goa'uld.
- jwolcott, on 11/12/2008, -1/+12Wow, this is the first time I hear about SGI in ages. I had almost completely forgotten about them. Anyone else?
- AmyVernon, on 11/11/2008, -0/+9Who knew!? That's pretty wild, actually...
- mirunit, on 11/12/2008, -0/+5"This storage solution can hold more than 1.8 Petabytes of data, and can transfer that data up to a sustained rate of 72GB/Sec."
Very nice. - jbmcb, on 11/12/2008, -0/+4> Nowadays they sell machines with Intel motherboards and CPUs. Pathetic.
Right, because it makes more sense to spend billions developing your own CPU for your niche market, than leveraging the mass market and having somebody else do all the expensive research for you.
The margins are gone on hardware, the profit is in components or software and service. - KibibyteBrain, on 11/12/2008, -0/+4I don't think that's a reference appreciated by the SGI marketing department!
- inactive, on 11/12/2008, -0/+4"We all know SGI for making high-end workstations......"
ehh no. we all know them for being driven into the ground by hilariously incompetent management who were more interested in selling company IP and patents than actually moving ahead with R&D and a product line. Nowadays they sell machines with Intel motherboards and CPUs. Pathetic. they should be broken up, sold and the money given back to the shareholders. - Ninh, on 11/12/2008, -4/+7I thought they hid the nukes in SGI cases which nobody would even think of stealing.
- hasslinthehoff, on 11/12/2008, -0/+3Good to see they are still in business, but their website is worse than I remember:
http://www.sgi.com/ - jbmcb, on 11/12/2008, -0/+3They now make Linux based clusters. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em :)
- rjhintz, on 11/12/2008, -0/+3Who writes this stuff? It reads like SGI PR instead of reporting.
- ChayD, on 11/12/2008, -0/+3I thought they died out years ago what with the surge in low-cost, commodity Linux clustering. They made probably the most distinctive and colorful array of machines ever seen (still got a pile of SGI boxes at home, looks like a rainbow!). Remember electropaint? Probably the best thing in screensavers, ever :) Not to mention FSN.
- rdolishny, on 11/12/2008, -0/+3I have one of the last SGI NT workstations they built. It's running W2K or maybe XP but it's the most solid machine in our building and I love using it whenever I can. It was one of the last certified NT boxes for Discreet Edit (NLE) and it is still running today as good as the day the company bought it.
I recall it costing $8K when 'comparable' boxes were well under $2K. But where are those other boxes now? I know one is the boss' kids web computer. And two are in my render farm at the moment.
But the SGI continues to bill out $75/h as a suite, and employs an editor at well over $50/h. - inactive, on 11/12/2008, -0/+3Wonder what the israelis use?
- pedo, on 11/12/2008, -2/+5probably the exact same ***** we use, since they get all their weapons and nuclear technology from us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel-United_States_ ... - bundwallah, on 11/12/2008, -0/+3SGI has great tech, bad marketing/business sense.
- balliamo, on 11/12/2008, -0/+3Same here, I heard few months ago that they dropped IRIX after version 6.5.28. They now use RedHat . RIP IRIX
- Ricochetbiscuit, on 11/12/2008, -0/+2And a little scary that you need a super computer to take care of that business. But I guess it makes sense... better than using a Eee PC or the like!
- LanceUppercut, on 11/12/2008, -0/+2All I know is this company had its' computers featured in Jurassic Park the movie, so it will always have a warm place in my heart.
Every few years I go on ebay to check out their cases to attempt to do a casemod, this year I might actually do it :) - balliamo, on 11/12/2008, -0/+2I just loved the O2 and the octane. I wish you could buy such a case for your home PC.
- Ademan, on 11/12/2008, -0/+2http://fsv.sourceforge.net/ Just in case you miss FSN that much :-)
- ChayD, on 11/14/2008, -0/+2Awesome! Thanks for the tip :)
- TiMMY8765, on 11/12/2008, -1/+3that's the SGC
- Portwineboy, on 11/12/2008, -0/+1I'm retiring my SGI Origin 350 running Irix, early next year. Who wants to be that my new HP/Red Hat box won't be nearly as bullet proof? In 4 years my SGI has only been down twice, once to relocate, and once when our building was hit with a massive power spike that blew out my UPS.
- jbmcb, on 11/13/2008, -0/+1> They used to be in a league of their own, a no-brainer for HPC research, design, weapons development etc..
Absolutely, because 3d hardware, their bread and butter, used to be a unique market. Now you can buy viz-class 3d hardware from a dozen different vendors on Newegg, all based on either ATI or nVidia chipsets. It doesn't make economic sense to compete with Intel/nVidia/AMD/ATI, when they have hundreds of millions to throw at new silicon every year.
> they used to have the financial muscle and talent to do this and they did it quite well until management sold their IP to Microsoft, NVidia ATI etc.
They saw the writing on the wall. The UNIX vendors were getting their asses handed to them by beige NT boxes. 3dlabs got crushed by nVidia, who leveraged their consumer based silicon to build boards that trounced the 3dlabs cards at half the price. Intergraph switched from proprietary hardware and clipper to NT clones with high performance graphics subsystems early in the game and did pretty well until they, too got massacred by nVidia and ATI.
> And as far as disappearing margins go, you are confusing consumer level hardware and government contract hardware.
No I'm not. I'll grant there's the odd, high-availability system here and there, but the bulk of the midrange systems are re-badged reference Intel designs. Big iron is being replaced by blades and clusters of commodity hardware. IBM doesn't make that much on hardware, they make it in service and support contracts. And Unisys does subcontract work for Dell now. - mswope, on 11/12/2008, -1/+2Frankly, I thought they went under or were subsumed into another company.
- Darksoul, on 11/12/2008, -0/+1Don't kid yourself though we give them ***** we don't give them ***** like this not even close.
- kacymartin, on 11/12/2008, -0/+1SGI Cray Cyber supercomputers are used to operate the PAVE PAWS early warning detection system. They're now being replaced with HP-UX machines.
- Obonic, on 11/12/2008, -0/+1W00T! SIG ROCKS@!
- inactive, on 11/12/2008, -0/+1Maybe I didn't make myself clear, I was implying that they are now in the league of Toshiba, Intel, NEC, Siemens, HP etc when it comes to bidding for Government contracts, quite a crowd. They used to be in a league of their own, a no-brainer for HPC research, design, weapons development etc.. And as for spending on developing their own hardware, they used to have the financial muscle and talent to do this and they did it quite well until management sold their IP to Microsoft, NVidia ATI etc. And as far as disappearing margins go, you are confusing consumer level hardware and government contract hardware. Government/Corporate contracts are like blank checks. Once you are in that circle and known for delivering on promises, money is never a problem. That's why you don't see the likes of IBM or Sun hawking their wares in your local Best Buy.
- CarzorStelatis, on 11/13/2008, -0/+1'Safe' is a relative term when talking about illegal WMDs.
- LilRabbitFooFoo, on 11/12/2008, -0/+1Because that's all it is.
- letmesleep, on 11/12/2008, -0/+0Find out what else Nichiren Buddhism can do for you!
- trestevenson, on 11/12/2008, -2/+2I was unaware that they used to own Cray.
- LilRabbitFooFoo, on 11/12/2008, -2/+1SGI has been a dead commodity for a decade now. Buried.
- dragon76, on 11/13/2008, -2/+1I thought Carly killed HP-UX?
- nowsourcing, on 11/12/2008, -2/+1Nice. This makes me think of the movie Wargames.
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