6 ms·

Why SGI failed: https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-1/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizw

Why SGI failed: https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-1/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-2/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-3/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-4/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-chapter-5/ https://vizworld.com/2009/04/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-cha... https://vizworld.com/2009/05/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-epilogue/ https://vizworld.com/2009/05/what-led-to-the-fall-of-sgi-epi... It's a long story...

ulzeraj 5y ago
Also Itanium.
oppositelock 5y ago
Oh, it's a lot longer story than that. I worked as SGI from just around its peak, to its downfall, seeing the company shrink to a tenth of its size while cutting products. At the time, I was a fairly junior employee doing research in AGD, the advanced graphics division. I saw funny things, which should have led me to resign, but I didn't know better at the time. Starting in the late 90's, SGI was feeling competitive pressure from 3DFx, NVIDIA, 3DLabs, Evans and Sutherland (dying, but big), and they hadn't released a new graphics architecture in years. They were selling Infinite Reality 2's (which were just a clock increase over IR1), and some tired Impact graphics on Octanes. The O2 was long in the tooth. Internally, engineering was working on next gen graphics for both, and they were both dying of creeping featureitis. Nothing ever made a deadline, they kept slipping by months. The high end graphics pipes to replace infinite reality never shipped due to this, and the "VPro" graphics for Octane were fatally broken on a fundamental level, where fixing it would mean going back to the algorithmic drawing board, not just some Verilog tweak, basically, taping out a new chip. Why was it so broken? Because some engineers decided to implement a cool theory and were allowed to do it (no clipping, recursive rasterization, hilbert space memory organization). At the same time, NVIDIA was shipping the GeForce, 3DFx was dying, and these consumer cards processed many times more triangles than SGI's flagship Infinite Reality 2, which was the size of a refrigerator and pulled kilowatts. SGI kept saying that anti-aliasing is the killer feature of SGI and that this is why we continue to sell into visual simulation and oil and gas sector. The line rendering quality on SGI hardware was far better as well. However, given SGI wasn't able to ship a new graphics system in perhaps 6 years at that point, and NVIDIA was launching a new architecture every two years, the reason to use SGI at big money customers quickly disappeared. As for Rick Beluzzo, man, the was a buffoon. My first week at SGI was the week he became CEO, and in my very first allhands ever, someone asked something along the lines of, "We are hemmoraging a lot of money, what are you going to do about it"? He replied with, "Yeah, we are, but HP, E&S, etc, are hemmoraging a lot more and they have less in the bank, so we'll pick up their business". I should have quit my first week.
- buescher 5y ago
  I have no clue what hilbert space memory organization could possibly be - arbitrarily deep hardware support for indirect addressing? - but it sounds simultaneously very cool and like an absolutely terrible idea.
  - vardump 5y ago
    Nowadays all GPUs implement something similar (not necessarily Hilbert but maybe Morton order or similar) to achieve high rate of cache hits when spatially close pixels are accessed. 3D graphics would have terrible performance without that technique.
    - buescher 5y ago
      Got it. I was imagining something else entirely.
  - oppositelock 5y ago
    the framebuffer had a recursive rasterizer which followed a hilbert curve through memory, the thinking being that you bottom out the recursion instead performing triangle clipping, which was really expensive for the hardware at the time. The problem was that when you take some polygons which come close to W=0 after perspective correction, their unclipped coordinates get humongous and you run out of interpolator precision. So, imagine you draw one polygon for the sky, another for the ground, and the damn things Z-fight each other! SGI even came out with an extension to "hint" to the driver whether you want fast or accurate clipping on Octane. When set to fast, it was fast and wrong. When set to accurate, we did it on the CPU [1] 1 - https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/extensions/SGIX/SGIX_vertex_preclip.txt https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/extensions/SGIX/SGIX...
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Trying to be both sell a seller of very high end computer products while also doing your own chips and graphics at the same time is quite the lift. And at the same time their market was massively attacked from the low end. The area where companies could do all that and do it successfully kind of ended in the late 90s. IBM survived but nothing can kill them, I assume they suffered too. What do you think, going back to your first day, if you were CEO could have been done? I always thought for Sun OpenSource Solaris, embracing x86, being RedHat and eventually Cloud could have been the winning combination.
panick21_ 5y ago
Podcast seems to be gone.
jart 5y ago
That reads like a tabloid, the way it attacks individuals and t-shirts. I heard the fall of SGI summed up in one sentence once. It went something like, "SGI had a culture that prevented them from creating a computer that cost less than $50,000." That's all probably all we need to know.
- digisign 5y ago
  --> The Innovator's Dilemma
the_only_law 5y ago
I always find the story of DEC interesting as well.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  It was the pinnacle of tech tragedy to see them being acquired by Compaq. At least until Oracle, of all companies, acquired Sun...
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    No one else stepped in to cover their offer, it was either Oracle, or be broken into pieces to pay their debts.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      Honestly that would have been much better for the world.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        I guess, people would enjoy being stuck with Java 6 or going back to C++98, or never have experienced a UNIX where C is actually prevented to do its typical misbehaviours since a decade now.
        rbanffy 5y ago
        > being stuck with Java 6 OpenJDK would have remained an option and other organizations would be more than able to steer the language.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        You mean the same organizations that currently contribute about 10%, and mostly create their own distributions out of Oracle work?

ulzeraj 5y ago

Also Itanium.

oppositelock 5y ago

Oh, it's a lot longer story than that. I worked as SGI from just around its peak, to its downfall, seeing the company shrink to a tenth of its size while cutting products. At the time, I was a fairly junior employee doing research in AGD, the advanced graphics division. I saw funny things, which should have led me to resign, but I didn't know better at the time. Starting in the late 90's, SGI was feeling competitive pressure from 3DFx, NVIDIA, 3DLabs, Evans and Sutherland (dying, but big), and they hadn't released a new graphics architecture in years. They were selling Infinite Reality 2's (which were just a clock increase over IR1), and some tired Impact graphics on Octanes. The O2 was long in the tooth. Internally, engineering was working on next gen graphics for both, and they were both dying of creeping featureitis. Nothing ever made a deadline, they kept slipping by months. The high end graphics pipes to replace infinite reality never shipped due to this, and the "VPro" graphics for Octane were fatally broken on a fundamental level, where fixing it would mean going back to the algorithmic drawing board, not just some Verilog tweak, basically, taping out a new chip. Why was it so broken? Because some engineers decided to implement a cool theory and were allowed to do it (no clipping, recursive rasterization, hilbert space memory organization). At the same time, NVIDIA was shipping the GeForce, 3DFx was dying, and these consumer cards processed many times more triangles than SGI's flagship Infinite Reality 2, which was the size of a refrigerator and pulled kilowatts. SGI kept saying that anti-aliasing is the killer feature of SGI and that this is why we continue to sell into visual simulation and oil and gas sector. The line rendering quality on SGI hardware was far better as well. However, given SGI wasn't able to ship a new graphics system in perhaps 6 years at that point, and NVIDIA was launching a new architecture every two years, the reason to use SGI at big money customers quickly disappeared. As for Rick Beluzzo, man, the was a buffoon. My first week at SGI was the week he became CEO, and in my very first allhands ever, someone asked something along the lines of, "We are hemmoraging a lot of money, what are you going to do about it"? He replied with, "Yeah, we are, but HP, E&S, etc, are hemmoraging a lot more and they have less in the bank, so we'll pick up their business". I should have quit my first week.

buescher 5y ago
I have no clue what hilbert space memory organization could possibly be - arbitrarily deep hardware support for indirect addressing? - but it sounds simultaneously very cool and like an absolutely terrible idea.
- vardump 5y ago
  Nowadays all GPUs implement something similar (not necessarily Hilbert but maybe Morton order or similar) to achieve high rate of cache hits when spatially close pixels are accessed. 3D graphics would have terrible performance without that technique.
  - buescher 5y ago
    Got it. I was imagining something else entirely.
- oppositelock 5y ago
  the framebuffer had a recursive rasterizer which followed a hilbert curve through memory, the thinking being that you bottom out the recursion instead performing triangle clipping, which was really expensive for the hardware at the time. The problem was that when you take some polygons which come close to W=0 after perspective correction, their unclipped coordinates get humongous and you run out of interpolator precision. So, imagine you draw one polygon for the sky, another for the ground, and the damn things Z-fight each other! SGI even came out with an extension to "hint" to the driver whether you want fast or accurate clipping on Octane. When set to fast, it was fast and wrong. When set to accurate, we did it on the CPU [1] 1 - https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/extensions/SGIX/SGIX_vertex_preclip.txt https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/extensions/SGIX/SGIX...
panick21_ 5y ago
Trying to be both sell a seller of very high end computer products while also doing your own chips and graphics at the same time is quite the lift. And at the same time their market was massively attacked from the low end. The area where companies could do all that and do it successfully kind of ended in the late 90s. IBM survived but nothing can kill them, I assume they suffered too. What do you think, going back to your first day, if you were CEO could have been done? I always thought for Sun OpenSource Solaris, embracing x86, being RedHat and eventually Cloud could have been the winning combination.

panick21_ 5y ago

Podcast seems to be gone.

jart 5y ago

That reads like a tabloid, the way it attacks individuals and t-shirts. I heard the fall of SGI summed up in one sentence once. It went something like, "SGI had a culture that prevented them from creating a computer that cost less than $50,000." That's all probably all we need to know.

digisign 5y ago
--> The Innovator's Dilemma

the_only_law 5y ago

I always find the story of DEC interesting as well.

rbanffy 5y ago
It was the pinnacle of tech tragedy to see them being acquired by Compaq. At least until Oracle, of all companies, acquired Sun...
- pjmlp 5y ago
  No one else stepped in to cover their offer, it was either Oracle, or be broken into pieces to pay their debts.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    Honestly that would have been much better for the world.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      I guess, people would enjoy being stuck with Java 6 or going back to C++98, or never have experienced a UNIX where C is actually prevented to do its typical misbehaviours since a decade now.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        > being stuck with Java 6 OpenJDK would have remained an option and other organizations would be more than able to steer the language.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        You mean the same organizations that currently contribute about 10%, and mostly create their own distributions out of Oracle work?