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When I said "for some reason", I was trying not to go into speculation. But yeah, ARM definitely attacked them in the embedded market from the lower end. And Mo
by puzzle 8y ago
When I said "for some reason", I was trying not to go into speculation. But yeah, ARM definitely attacked them in the embedded market from the lower end. And Motorola, transitioning from 68k to PPC, from the high end (PPC was very popular for laser printers, for example), later joined by IBM (Cell/Xenon). We all know what happened to SGI in the server/workstation market.
- pjmlp 8y agoSGI also have themselves to blame when they decided to be just yet another hardware vendor selling Linux/Windows systems.
- bogomipz 8y agoI'm not understanding your comment. Weren't they always just that - a hardware vendor? I think they had some image editing stuff that only ran on their boxes but didn't they still essentially make their money on the high end hardware needed to run those programs?
- pjmlp 8y agoAll commercial UNIX vendors were hardware vendors. What made them special is how they combined their hardware with their own version version of UNIX. Hence why even trying to write portable code across UNIXEs wasn't as easy as many believe. Irix had IrisGL, Iris Inventor, XFS and a few other goodies, before they became the Open variants. SGI was also a big sponsor of the C++ STL work.
- trasz 8y agoTwenty different vendors combined their hardware with their own version of Unix. There was nothing special about that.
- pjmlp 8y agoSure there was, the vertical integration and overall user experience.
- walterbell 8y agoWith the end of Moore's Law, are we returning to vertically integrated hardware+software? Domain Specific Architecture talk by Hennessy & Patterson, 2018 talk for 2017 Turing Award: http://iscaconf.org/isca2018/docs/HennessyPattersonTuringLectureISCA4June2018.pdf http://iscaconf.org/isca2018/docs/HennessyPattersonTuringLec...
- pjmlp 8y agoI will watch the talk later. However I can say yes, we are returning to those days. Thanks to the thin razor margins you see OEMs now selling un-upgradable phones, laptops, tablets, 2-1, leaving the old desktop PC for a niche market that gets smaller every year, mostly targeted at gamers. Also OEMs got envious of Apple as the surviving icon of those days, all of them want to be Apple of their market and sell experiences.
- bogomipz 8y agoHow did that make them different than all the other vendors that had their own hardware and versions of UNIX at the time - HPUX, Solaris, DEC etc?
- trasz 8y agoSGI abandoned MIPS and IRIX, because there was no longer any economical reason to maintain them - x86 was faster and cheaper, and Windows was much more popular than Unix. SGI's main strenght was GPUs, not workstations.