Silicon Graphics (SGI)

» see sgi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

by the time i would have used an sgi workstation, the workstation as a category was already gone. i was in computer engineering at metu around 2004, the lab machines were dell optiplex boxes running redhat. sgi indy and indigo machines sat in a back closet next to the older sun ultra boxes, powered off, with the original purple and teal plastic still in good shape. somebody at the lab told me they used to run maya on them. nobody had booted one in years.

sgi was founded in november 1981 by jim clark and seven of his stanford graduate students. clark had been a computer graphics professor and the early pitch was the geometry engine, a vlsi chip that did 3d transform-and-lighting in hardware at a time when every other workstation was doing it in software. the iris 1400 in 1984 was the first commercial machine. the iris 4d series followed in 1988 running irix, sgi's bsd-flavored unix.

this part i was not around for. the company hit its commercial peak in the early-to-mid nineties. jurassic park in 1993 was the cultural moment, the dinosaurs were rendered at industrial light and magic on sgi crimson machines using softimage 3d and renderman. terminator 2's morphing t-1000, every george lucas film through the prequels, toy story, twister, independence day, almost every visual-effects feature of the decade was rendered on sgi hardware. the iris workstation was the brand on the desk wherever digital film was being made.

the slow decline started around 1998. the irix-and-mips architecture was expensive to develop on a customer base that was shrinking. nvidia and ati cards started outperforming the sgi geometry pipelines on commodity pcs by 2000. by 2003 most studios had moved their render farms to linux on dual-xeon boxes for roughly one tenth the price per node. sgi filed chapter 11 on may 8 2006, emerged in october 2006, filed again on april 1 2009. rackable systems bought the assets for forty-two and a half million dollars on may 8 2009 and adopted the sgi name. the original company was gone.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the machines did ~

the hardware was beautiful. the indigo in purple plastic from 1991, the indy in teal from 1993, the o2 in blue from 1996, the octane and the octane2 from 1997 to 2000. the design language was molded plastic in saturated solid colors at a time when every other workstation looked like beige rack equipment. each one had the sgi logo etched into the front plate above the power button. the cases were the part you remember even if you never owned one.

irix did things commercial unix workstations of the era could not. the xfs filesystem was originally an sgi design, later open-sourced and used in linux for big-storage applications. opengl came out of sgi's iris gl in 1992 as the standard 3d graphics api that every game and rendering tool still uses some descendant of. the onyx reality engine in 1993 was the rack-mounted multi-pipe version that drove the cave virtual reality systems at nasa and the universities. those machines cost between two hundred thousand and a million dollars each.

~ the unraveling ~

the architectural choice that broke the company was mips. sgi had bought mips computer systems in 1992 to lock in the cpu pipeline. by 2000 the intel itanium and amd opteron lines were faster and cheaper. sgi spent six years from 2000 to 2006 trying to migrate the workstation line to itanium under the prism program, the project produced two underperforming product generations (fuel, tezro) and missed the moment when linux on commodity x86 became the new render-farm standard.

the customer side moved faster than the company could rebuild. pixar moved to intel-and-linux boxes for the renderfarm by 2002. ilm migrated through the same window. by 2004 the visual-effects industry had essentially finished its transition off irix and onto linux. sgi's revenue dropped from three and a half billion dollars in 1997 to under one billion by 2005. the may 2006 chapter 11 was the formal response to a multi-year burn rate.

~ what replaced it ~

the technical inheritance is wide. opengl is alive everywhere. xfs is in mainline linux. the geometry engine philosophy of hardware-accelerated 3d transform-and-lighting is the basic mental model behind every nvidia and amd gpu shipping today. when nvidia released the geforce 256 in 1999 with hardware t-and-l, the marketing claimed it was the first consumer gpu to do what sgi's iris workstations had been doing for fifteen years.

the corporate inheritance is thinner. rackable kept the sgi name from 2009 to 2016, when hewlett packard enterprise bought rackable-sgi for two hundred seventy-five million dollars. hpe still ships some products under the sgi label inside its high-performance computing line. the mountain view amphitheater parkway campus that sgi built and sold to google in 2003 is now part of the google plex. when you see a press photo of the google headquarters with the colorful lawn ornaments, that ground used to be sgi's main campus.

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