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I remember, in 2003, going to a tech demo being put by SGI at our university. It was obvious that they'd been running this same demo for years, in part because
by rprospero 12y ago
I remember, in 2003, going to a tech demo being put by SGI at our university. It was obvious that they'd been running this same demo for years, in part because some of their showcase graphics would have looked dated on my friend's Xbox. I knew from classmates that they're hardware was capable of more than was being shown, but I also got the feeling that they'd stopped pushing the envelope.
- acdha 12y agoThe other thing to remember is that SGI had gone through their disastrous pivot to a custom (i.e. unsupportable) version of Windows and switching to Intel's then-architecture of the future (Itanium), which was a huge write-off even for Intel[1]. That soaked up a huge amount of resources just to catch up to their existing products and, worse, was a message to their existing customers that the old SGI hardware was a dead-end and the new stuff was unproven, which lead most of them to migrate to standard PCs to avoid being locked into the fate of a single vendor. It's possible that things could have been very different with better senior managers who could limited the number of simultaneous risky transitions or recognized that semiconductor economics would quickly give high-volume “toy” 3D accelerators a huge advantage over niche workstation hardware. 1. Seriously, check out the sales graphs – this is staggering flop given how much hype the entire industry got about Itanium and VLIW being the way, truth and light going forward: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#mediaviewer/File:Itanium_Sales_Forecasts_edit.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#mediaviewer/File:Itaniu...