The SGI’s were basically the first machines blender was developed on. Unless they pull off miracle it looks like the once great SGI won’t be around much longer.
This is sad.
SGI’s are some of the best computers.
They need to do something to stay alive.
I would buy a cheap desktop/workstation from them. (Is this what they’ll end up doing? There’s no market for expensive visualization workstations anymore).
Sad news indeed.
It was bound to happen.
Kind of sad, but the end’s been in sight since their foray into NT workstations that went badly astray.
Everyone in the industry could learn from SGI just on case design. Some of them are inspired, not just looking good (and decent colours) externally, but with how modular they are inside without feeling fragile. Only Apple possibly come close to them at that, and I suspect it’s Apple’s moves into video, compositing and UNIX workstations for science combined with Linux in 3D land that’s ultimately killed them off. I’ve got an old Indigo lying around and it’s very odd how much the desktop on that feels like an antiquated version of OS X. Scaling icons everywhere etc.
One of SGI’s massive problems was that MIPS didn’t keep up with the pace of the rest of the industry, and IRIX was very tied to it. Combined with 3D cards outpacing processors and you have a real problem.
The underestimated thing about SGI’s golden age is the effect it had on the graphics industry, because their kit was so expensive that it raised the cost of entry. This meant that those who were in the industry could charge that much more because a bunch of students down the road wouldn’t be able to use their PCs to compete with you. Commoditisation of an industry is often the beginning of the end of decent margins. It’s easy to romanticise such an age that very few (if any) of us here were part of, and Blender is arguably part of the great commoditisation.
There were good things about SGI, but their (and the software) prices kept a lot of talented people from ever getting their hands on the kit. Conversely these days you have the situation where all sorts of morons download their warez copies of Max and decide to try and remake LoTR then flooding the forums of the Internet with their efforts.
I would imagine they’ll get snapped up by an IBM, HP, Sun, Apple or nVidia. They have (or at least had) some great people, and presumably have something resembling valuable patents lying around. Either way it’s real end of an era stuff.
I suspect that has much to do with the recent boom i 3D games requiring
3D cards the last 10-12 years.
After the PC got it’s very first dedicated 3D card, I belive it was a Voodoo-1
card from 3DFX (which I got immedately when it was released) then
a new era had been set. Real-3D editing - was no longer limited to
expensive SGI-stations.
Remember SGI? Most of the people in Elysiun has only “heard” of SGI and
the others where too poor to own one (me). It was my dream back then
to own one of those - but it never happened, it was too expensive.
I could not possible afford $50000,- just for a workstation, but thats
what they cost over here in Norway/Denmark back then.
All that changed when the games enthusiast started craving 3D-technology
on their platforms. I remember about 8 years ago it was even possible
to use 3dstudio max with Standard OpenGL…and at the school we
purchased cheap gaming-cards to access 3d-editing at hyperspeeds.
The only problem back then was texture-memory, very limited on game-
cards…and if you bought speciality cards that had eg… 128 Mb ram for
textures…you’d have to fork out almost as much as an SGI-station on
your PC to get this…today 128 Mb is the standard on gaming cards…now
moving towards 256, and even 512 mb.
What a world 
It’s sad to see SGI (A landmark for 3D) go…but at the same time it’s
also signifying the demise of expensive 3d - and it’s the end of exclusivity
for the few fortunates that can afford it…or lucky enough to work in a
place that had it.
I have a sneaky suspicion that’s where OpenSource & GPL will take us
to the next step (SGI all over again…but this time…public domained!)
as Blender made semi-professional 3D available to everyone…in a time
when 3D software still costs a fortune.
How will this affect their open source development (for instance the GLX lib)?
The issue that many fail to realize, is that SGIs are about bandwidth not speed. Until quite recently (2004) discreet still only sold its video editing software for Irix. Here is a basic overview of the differences in a PC and a SGI box:
PC - Uses a buss to communicate across the motherboard. The problem is that you can have a 1.5Ghz CPU with a 200Mhz FSB (Front Side Buss). Which means no matter how fast the CPU is data can only come into it at 200Mhz.
SGI - Uses a star style network to communicate. Just like a common ethernet hub, the SGI Octane allows any part of the system (memory, CPUs, HDD video card, network) to communicate with any other at over 1Gbps.
So PCs are very deep and narrow, meant for doing a ton of crunching on a small amount of data. SGIs are wide and shallow, meant for doing a very little amount of crunching on a ton of data.
Case in Point. A properly equipped SGI system can display 4 2K film streams at one time. Seeing each stream runs at ~300MB/s. I would love to see someone try to shove that much data down the buss of a PC/Mac.
Yes, SGI is dead (unless somthing big happens), but I’m really sad to see them go…
Awesome video machines.
I agree with what someone else said that I think Apple killed them off. With PCI express able to transfer at 10Gbps:
and processors with a dedicated 1GHz fsb each, it can compete on bandwidth terms. G5s can do real-time 2k color correction:
http://www.pluginz.com/news/1176
and now they are getting support for high-end video cards.
I don’t think SGI will necessarily die completely, they still hold the third spot for the world’s fastest supercomputer so maybe they will just make high-end solutions. It will probably mean Irix will go the way of BeOS though but most people use one of the main 3 anyway so I don’t think it’s a bad thing.
I don’t think it will affect things like OpenGL development because that is largely kept up by graphics card manufacturers now anyway. I read the creators of OpenGL have worked for ATI, NVidia etc. for a while.
Yeah, but the thing I forgot to mention was that the SGI systems could do the above back in 1997.
True, PCI Express has brought alot to the table. But please, oh, please can’t the buss topology just die?
In fairness said SGI system would also cost you an awful lot of money. Especially given Quantel (big in tv) produced workable NT based kit, and having products like Shake start to make serious dents in compositing, albeit in the non-realtime variety.
Totally right about the bus speed. Blender render times involving massive textures were much faster on my ancient Indigo than on my old PC, but push up the polycount/lighting and it would slow to a crawl whilst the PC would slow only a normal amount.
Ultimately too many people have chipped away at the mass earning sections of SGI’s product portfolio, leaving the only areas they really excel in as running Inferno etc. and supercomputing.
I seem to recall the US Government used to account for a vast proportion of their revenues, so if that’s gone to Linux clusters, and PC workstations then that would hurt.
I belive it was a Voodoo-1
card from 3DFX
still have one. all cleaned and tidyed up. looks like a new one - for my personal museum. It ran UT2 at 640×480. no other card had a picture like 3dfx.
Ahh yes, the good old days, I had a 8MB Voodoo2. It was sad to see 3dfx go too, according to many people Glide was superior to both Direct3D and OpenGL.
I remember I got this benchmark CD with the card, it was called “Final Reality”, the precursor to 3DMark. I tried it out some years later on a Geforce2, and it flew at over 300fps. Haven’t tried it with my current Radeon yet
I think that its only a matter of time till a lot of companies like that are gonna go under, sun despite its best efforts is still struggling to stay afloat. SGI was a niche market, and it seems that it hasnt attempted to expand like sun, and the like have tried. Its sad, but so was the fall of the sparc processor, those were good, faster than anything else back in the day, now they’re still fast, but nobody uses em, and they’ve had their dates for burial set. Be was another great company now passed from common knowledge, I actually bought BeOS 5. IT was really cool, it looked like a mac, ran bash, and booted up in like 15 seconds on my old 450 k6 computer… It was great! it was probably the first company to offer really affordable dual proccessor machines too. In the end, all good things must end, But dont worry, there will be better things to take its place. I just hope openGL wont die, Its hung on for a long time, but with all the videocard manufacturers going towards DirectX, even nVidia(which is sad), Linux and the like will most likely have to adopt some reverse-egineering tactics to get power out of nextgen videocards.
We’ll see if they can pull it together, but my bets are not on SGI, they’ve just tried to reinvent the same thing over and over instead of branching out.
i just was given a bunch of octanes and idys so I love this thread .
I hear the real good software was locked up yearly with a machine anchored license
anyway i am loading octanes and o2 and indys with irix 6.5 and using lightwave 5 and blender
any suggestions?
I figure the octane crossbar and the fast blast of high resolution screen display helps the render .
then some sgi systems admins have told me i can cross pLATFORM THE FILES VIA A SGI ORIGIN SERVER UP TO MODERN PC’S FOR BETTER QUICKTIME OUTPUT
ANY SUGGESTIONS ARE APPRECIATED .
Cheers
Bruce
well I called mountain view .
They(SGI) are alive and doing medical visualizing and defense fast display and recon satellite work at extreemly high definition …The servers down load terrabits per second …yikes!!!
Also they have an 8 k projector that rocks .
They serve the enterainment field with superfast servers for working on fast theater uploads when projecting features (something I think which is in the near future) .
i have there old worksations and I try to squeeze some use out of them .My trust in the sgi quality is more about what i suspect than what I truly know >
Cheers:D
Bruce
Please don’t bump 4 month old threads unless you’ve got a really good reason. And seeing as you’ve already posted another thread about your new SGI’s you don’t need to cross post (and then post again right afterwards) into an old thread.
Thanks.