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The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

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346 points BirAdam | 4 comments | 05 Apr 24 16:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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vrinsd ◴[05 Apr 24 18:25 UTC] No.39945487[source]▶
I believe nVidia was started with a lot of SGI's core technology ; not "I have a good idea and I can't do it here" and more like "let me just take this stuff I doubt anyone will notice". I think SGI sued but didn't really pursue the matter because they didn't really see nVidia as a threat. I think Jensen was pivotal in this "technology transfer".

Regarding computing cycles, boom/bust, I recently re-read Soul of New Machine and was struck by how much the world has NOT changed. Sure we're not talking about micro/mini-computers and writing micro-coded assembly but the whole "the market is pivoting and we need to ride this wave" and "work like a dog to meet some almost unobtainum goal" seems to still underpin being an engineer in "tech" today.

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formerly_proven ◴[05 Apr 24 19:39 UTC] No.39946277[source]▶
From my reading SGI was already dead and falling apart by that time. If you look at 3D, SGI had two graphics architectures in the 90s: RealityEngine from 1992 and InfiniteReality from 1996. They never managed to release a follow-up to IR. Similarly everything that came after about 1996-97 was a refresh of a prior product with only marginal changes. And then they went bankrupt in the early 2000s. So SGI had really only a very brief productive period that was over by the second half of the 1990s.

SGI also never had a presence in business critical applications which gave some of the other vendors more momentum (HP-UX/PA-RISC, VMS/Alpha, Solaris/SPARC).

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1. cuno ◴[05 Apr 24 21:49 UTC] No.39947665[source]▶
I worked at SGI on the next generation (code named Bali) in 1998 (whole year as an intern) and 1999 (part time while finishing my degree, flying back and forth from Australia). Bali was revolutionary. The goal was realtime Renderman and it really would. I had an absolute blast. I ended up designing the highspeed data paths (shader operations) for world's first floating point frame buffer (FP16 though we called it S10E5) with the logic on embedded DRAM for maximum floating point throughput. It was light years ahead of its time. But the plug got pulled just as we were taping out. Most of the team ended up at Nvidia or ArtX/ATI. The GPU industry was a small world of engineers back then. We'd have house parties with GPU engineers across all the company names you'd expect, and with beer flowing sometimes maybe a few secrets could eh spill. We had an immersive room to give visual demos and Stephen Hawking came in once pitching for a discount.

For team building, we launched potato canons into NASA Moffet field, blew up or melted Sun machines for fun with thermite and explosives. Lots of amazing people and fond memories for a kid getting started.

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2. mrpippy ◴[06 Apr 24 00:51 UTC] No.39949009[source]▶
Very cool. Was Bali going to be the next high-end architecture after InfiniteReality? (I think IR was code-named “Kona” so the tropical codenames fit)

Why did they cancel it, money running out? It’s sad to think they were close to a new architecture but then just kept selling IR for years (and even sold a FireGL-based “Onyx” by the end).

Also was it a separate team working on the lower-end graphics like VPro/Odyssey?

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3. phonon ◴[06 Apr 24 04:42 UTC] No.39950033[source]▶
Why was Bali cancelled?
4. cuno ◴[06 Apr 24 05:47 UTC] No.39950299[source]▶
Yes Bali was the next gen architecture and incredibly scalable. It consisted of many different chips connected together in a network that could scale. The R chip was so big existing tools couldn't handle it and ppl were writing their own tools. As a result it was very expensive to tape out so many hefty chips and I think that's why when it came time, and with a financial crisis, upper management pulled the plug.

Yes there were separate teams working on the lower-end graphics.