Founded in Mountain View, California in November 1981 by Jim Clark, its initial market was 3D graphics computer workstations, but its products, strategies and market positions developed significantly over time. Early systems were based on the Geometry Engine that Clark and Marc Hannah had developed at Stanford University, and were derived from Clark's broader background in computer graphics.
Clark left his position as an electrical engineering associate professor at Stanford University to found SGI in 1982 along with a group of seven graduate students and research staff from Stanford University: Kurt Akeley, David J.
Brown, Tom Davis, Rocky Rhodes, Marc Hannah, Herb Kuta, and Mark Grossman; along with Abbey Silverstone and a few others. ===Growth=== Ed McCracken was CEO of Silicon Graphics from 1984 to 1997.
The later IRIS 2000 and 3000 models developed into full UNIX workstations. ====IRIS 1000 series==== The first entries in the 1000 series (models 1000 and 1200, introduced in 1984) were graphics terminals, peripherals to be connected to a general-purpose computer such as a Digital Equipment Corporation VAX, to provide graphical raster display abilities.
Six beta-test units of the 1400 workstation were produced, and the first production unit (SGI's first commercial computer) was shipped to Carnegie-Mellon University's Electronic Imaging Laboratory in 1984. ====IRIS 2000 and 3000 series==== SGI rapidly developed its machines into workstations with its second product line — the IRIS 2000 series, first released in August 1985.
Six beta-test units of the 1400 workstation were produced, and the first production unit (SGI's first commercial computer) was shipped to Carnegie-Mellon University's Electronic Imaging Laboratory in 1984. ====IRIS 2000 and 3000 series==== SGI rapidly developed its machines into workstations with its second product line — the IRIS 2000 series, first released in August 1985.
With large capacity hard drives by standards of the day (two 300 MB drives), streaming tape and Ethernet, it could be the centerpiece of an animation operation. The line was formally discontinued in November 1989, with about 3500 systems shipped of all 2000 and 3000 models combined. ===RISC era=== With the introduction of the IRIS 4D series, SGI switched to MIPS microprocessors.
For much of its history, the company focused on 3D imaging and was a major supplier of both hardware and software in this market. Silicon Graphics reincorporated as a Delaware corporation in January 1990.
As 3D graphics became more popular in television and film during this time, these systems were responsible for establishing much of SGI's reputation. SGI produced a broad range of MIPS-based workstations and servers during the 1990s, running SGI's version of UNIX System V, now called IRIX.
In 1997, twenty SGI employees, led by Yen, left SGI and founded ArtX (later acquired by ATI Technologies in 2000). In 1998, SGI relinquished some ownership of MIPS Technologies, Inc in a Re-IPO, and fully divested itself in 2000. In the late 1990s, when much of the industry expected the Itanium to replace both CISC and RISC architectures in non-embedded computers, SGI announced their intent to phase out MIPS in their systems.
Its main competitor (Direct3D from Microsoft) runs only on Microsoft Windows-based machines and some Microsoft gaming consoles. ===ACE Consortium=== SGI was part of the Advanced Computing Environment initiative, formed in the early 1990s with 20 other companies, including Compaq, Digital Equipment Corporation, MIPS Computer Systems, Groupe Bull, Siemens, NEC, NeTpower, Microsoft and Santa Cruz Operation.
These included the massive Onyx visualization systems, the size of refrigerators and capable of supporting up to 64 processors while managing up to three streams of high resolution, fully realized 3D graphics. In October 1991, MIPS announced the first commercially available 64-bit microprocessor, the R4000.
IRIX 6.2 was the first fully 64-bit IRIX release, including 64-bit pointers. To secure the supply of future generations of MIPS microprocessors (the 64-bit R4000), SGI acquired the company in 1992 for $333 million and renamed it as MIPS Technologies Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of SGI. In 1993, Silicon Graphics (SGI) signed a deal with Nintendo to develop the Reality Coprocessor (RCP) GPU used in the Nintendo 64 (N64) video game console.
In 1992, SGI decided to clean up and reform IRIS GL and made the bold move of allowing the resulting OpenGL API to be cheaply licensed by SGI's competitors, and set up an industry-wide consortium to maintain the OpenGL standard (the OpenGL Architecture Review Board). This meant that for the first time, fast, efficient, cross-platform graphics programs could be written.
IRIX 6.2 was the first fully 64-bit IRIX release, including 64-bit pointers. To secure the supply of future generations of MIPS microprocessors (the 64-bit R4000), SGI acquired the company in 1992 for $333 million and renamed it as MIPS Technologies Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of SGI. In 1993, Silicon Graphics (SGI) signed a deal with Nintendo to develop the Reality Coprocessor (RCP) GPU used in the Nintendo 64 (N64) video game console.
The deal was signed in early 1993, and it was later made public in August of that year.
the technology was also used in commercials for a host of companies. An SGI Crimson system with the fsn three-dimensional file system navigator appeared in the 1993 movie Jurassic Park. In the movie Twister, protagonists can be seen using an SGI laptop computer; however, the unit shown was not an actual working computer, but rather a fake laptop shell built around an SGI Corona LCD flat screen display. The 1995 film Congo also features an SGI laptop computer being used by Dr.
SGI's market capitalization dwindled from a peak of over seven billion dollars in 1995 to just $120 million at the time of delisting.
the technology was also used in commercials for a host of companies. An SGI Crimson system with the fsn three-dimensional file system navigator appeared in the 1993 movie Jurassic Park. In the movie Twister, protagonists can be seen using an SGI laptop computer; however, the unit shown was not an actual working computer, but rather a fake laptop shell built around an SGI Corona LCD flat screen display. The 1995 film Congo also features an SGI laptop computer being used by Dr.
The extension keeps being carried by the direct descendant STLport and GNU's libstdc++. ===Acquisition of Alias, Wavefront, Cray and Intergraph=== In 1995, SGI purchased Alias Research, Kroyer Films, and Wavefront Technologies in a deal totaling approximately $500 million and merged the companies into Alias|Wavefront.
The console itself was later released in 1996.
In October 2005, Autodesk announced that it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Alias for $182 million in cash. In February 1996, SGI purchased the well-known supercomputer manufacturer Cray Research for $740 million, and began to use marketing names such as "CrayLink" for (SGI-developed) technology integrated into the SGI server line.
This makes an SN system far easier to program and able to achieve higher sustained-to-peak performance than non-cache-coherent systems like conventional clusters or massively parallel computers which require applications code to be written (or re-written) to do explicit message-passing communication between their nodes. The first SN system, known as SN-0, was released in 1996 under the product name Origin 2000.
Brown, Tom Davis, Rocky Rhodes, Marc Hannah, Herb Kuta, and Mark Grossman; along with Abbey Silverstone and a few others. ===Growth=== Ed McCracken was CEO of Silicon Graphics from 1984 to 1997.
In 1997, twenty SGI employees, led by Yen, left SGI and founded ArtX (later acquired by ATI Technologies in 2000). In 1998, SGI relinquished some ownership of MIPS Technologies, Inc in a Re-IPO, and fully divested itself in 2000. In the late 1990s, when much of the industry expected the Itanium to replace both CISC and RISC architectures in non-embedded computers, SGI announced their intent to phase out MIPS in their systems.
In 1997, twenty SGI employees, led by Yen, left SGI and founded ArtX (later acquired by ATI Technologies in 2000). In 1998, SGI relinquished some ownership of MIPS Technologies, Inc in a Re-IPO, and fully divested itself in 2000. In the late 1990s, when much of the industry expected the Itanium to replace both CISC and RISC architectures in non-embedded computers, SGI announced their intent to phase out MIPS in their systems.
(stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American [computing] manufacturer, producing computer hardware and software.
The product line was unsuccessful and abandoned a few years later. SGI's premature announcement of its migration from MIPS to Itanium and its abortive ventures into IA-32 architecture systems (the Visual Workstation line, the ex-Intergraph Zx10 range and the SGI 1000-series Linux servers) damaged SGI's credibility in the market. In 1999, in an attempt to clarify their current market position as more than a graphics company, Silicon Graphics Inc.
As early as 1999 it was clear the Itanium was going to be delivered very late and would have nowhere near the performance originally expected.
Eventually it was forced to introduce faster MIPS processors, the R12000, R14000 and R16000, which were used in a series of models from 1999 through 2006. SGI's first Itanium-based system was the short-lived SGI 750 workstation, launched in 2001.
The later IRIS 2000 and 3000 models developed into full UNIX workstations. ====IRIS 1000 series==== The first entries in the 1000 series (models 1000 and 1200, introduced in 1984) were graphics terminals, peripherals to be connected to a general-purpose computer such as a Digital Equipment Corporation VAX, to provide graphical raster display abilities.
They may have used the PM2 CPU and PM2M1 RAM board from the 2000 series.
Six beta-test units of the 1400 workstation were produced, and the first production unit (SGI's first commercial computer) was shipped to Carnegie-Mellon University's Electronic Imaging Laboratory in 1984. ====IRIS 2000 and 3000 series==== SGI rapidly developed its machines into workstations with its second product line — the IRIS 2000 series, first released in August 1985.
There were five models in two product ranges, the 2000/2200/2300/2400/2500 range which used 68010 CPUs (the PM2 CPU module), and the later "Turbo" systems, the 2300T, 2400T and 2500T, which had 68020s (the IP2 CPU module).
60 Hz monitors were used for the 2000 series. The height of the machines using Motorola CPUs was reached with the IRIS 3000 series (models 3010/3020/3030 and 3110/3115/3120/3130, the 30s both being full-size rack machines).
They used the same graphics subsystem and Ethernet as the 2000s, but could also use up to 12 "geometry engines", the first widespread use of hardware graphics accelerators.
With large capacity hard drives by standards of the day (two 300 MB drives), streaming tape and Ethernet, it could be the centerpiece of an animation operation. The line was formally discontinued in November 1989, with about 3500 systems shipped of all 2000 and 3000 models combined. ===RISC era=== With the introduction of the IRIS 4D series, SGI switched to MIPS microprocessors.
In 1997, twenty SGI employees, led by Yen, left SGI and founded ArtX (later acquired by ATI Technologies in 2000). In 1998, SGI relinquished some ownership of MIPS Technologies, Inc in a Re-IPO, and fully divested itself in 2000. In the late 1990s, when much of the industry expected the Itanium to replace both CISC and RISC architectures in non-embedded computers, SGI announced their intent to phase out MIPS in their systems.
SGI sold the Cray brand and product lines to Tera Computer Company on March 31, 2000, for $35 million plus one million shares.
SGI also distributed its remaining interest in MIPS Technologies through a spin-off effective June 20, 2000. In September 2000, SGI acquired the Zx10 series of Windows workstations and servers from Intergraph Computer Systems (for a rumored $100 million), and rebadged them as SGI systems.
This makes an SN system far easier to program and able to achieve higher sustained-to-peak performance than non-cache-coherent systems like conventional clusters or massively parallel computers which require applications code to be written (or re-written) to do explicit message-passing communication between their nodes. The first SN system, known as SN-0, was released in 1996 under the product name Origin 2000.
Later enhancements enabled systems of as large as 512 processors. The second generation system, originally called SN-1 but later SN-MIPS, was released in July 2000, as the Origin 3000.
Eventually it was forced to introduce faster MIPS processors, the R12000, R14000 and R16000, which were used in a series of models from 1999 through 2006. SGI's first Itanium-based system was the short-lived SGI 750 workstation, launched in 2001.
A smaller, less scalable implementation followed, called Origin 300. In November 2002, SGI announced a repackaging of its SN system, under the name Origin 3900.
Its earlier North Shoreline headquarters is now occupied by the Computer History Museum; the newer Amphitheatre Parkway headquarters was sold to Google (which had already subleased and moved into the facility in 2003).
Google leased the former SGI buildings in 2003 for their headquarters in Mountain View, CA until they purchased the buildings outright in 2006. Once inexpensive PCs began to have graphics performance close to the more expensive specialized graphical workstations which were SGI's core business, SGI shifted its focus to high performance servers for digital video and the Web.
It quadrupled the processor area density of the SN-MIPS system, from 32 up to 128 processors per rack while moving to a "fat tree" interconnect topology. In January 2003, SGI announced a variant of the SN platform called the Altix 3000 (internally called SN-IA).
In June 2004 SGI sold the business, later renamed to Alias/Wavefront, to the private equity investment firm Accel-KKR for $57.1 million.
Nodes could be connected using the same NUMAlink technology to form what SGI predictably termed "superclusters". In February 2004, SGI announced general support for 128 processor nodes to be followed by 256 and 512 processor versions that year. In April 2004, SGI announced the sale of its Alias software business for approximately $57 million. In October 2004, SGI built the supercomputer Columbia, which broke the world record for computer speed, for the NASA Ames Research Center.
SGI continued to use the "Silicon Graphics" name for its workstation product line, and later re-adopted the cube logo for some workstation models. In November 2005, SGI announced that it had been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because its common stock had fallen below the minimum share price for listing on the exchange.
In October 2005, Autodesk announced that it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Alias for $182 million in cash. In February 1996, SGI purchased the well-known supercomputer manufacturer Cray Research for $740 million, and began to use marketing names such as "CrayLink" for (SGI-developed) technology integrated into the SGI server line.
In February 2006, SGI noted that it could run out of cash by the end of the year. ===Re-emergence=== In mid-2005, SGI hired Alix Partners to advise it on returning to profitability and received a new line of credit.
SGI announced it was postponing its scheduled annual December stockholders meeting until March 2006.
It proposed a reverse stock split to deal with the de-listing from the New York Stock Exchange. In January 2006, SGI hired Dennis McKenna as its new CEO and chairman of the board of directors.
McKenna succeeded Robert Bishop, who remained vice chairman of the board of directors. On May 8, 2006, SGI announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for itself and U.S.
Foreign subsidiaries were unaffected. On September 6, 2006, SGI announced the end of development for the MIPS/IRIX line and the IRIX operating system.
Support for these products would end after December 2013. SGI emerged from bankruptcy protection on October 17, 2006.
Google leased the former SGI buildings in 2003 for their headquarters in Mountain View, CA until they purchased the buildings outright in 2006. Once inexpensive PCs began to have graphics performance close to the more expensive specialized graphical workstations which were SGI's core business, SGI shifted its focus to high performance servers for digital video and the Web.
Eventually it was forced to introduce faster MIPS processors, the R12000, R14000 and R16000, which were used in a series of models from 1999 through 2006. SGI's first Itanium-based system was the short-lived SGI 750 workstation, launched in 2001.
In the workstation market, the switch to Itanium was not completed before SGI exited the market. The Altix was the most powerful computer in the world in 2006, assuming that a "computer" is defined as a collection of hardware running under a single instance of an operating system.
The first Altix XE systems were relatively low-end machines, but by December 2006 the XE systems were more capable than the Itanium machines by some measures (e.g., power consumption in FLOPS/W, density in FLOPS/m3, cost/FLOPS).
Production would end on December 29 and the last orders would be fulfilled by March 2007.
SGI acknowledged this and in 2007 moved away from the "massive NUMA" model to clusters. ===Switch to Xeon=== Although SGI continued to market Itanium-based machines, its more recent machines were based on the Intel Xeon processor.
This was a departure from the pure NUMA architectures of the earlier Itanium and MIPS servers. In June 2007, SGI announced the Altix ICE 8200, a blade-based Xeon system with up to 512 Xeon cores per rack.
An Altix ICE 8200 installed at New Mexico Computing Applications Center (with 14336 processors) ranked at number 3 on the TOP500 list of November 2007. ==User base and core market== Conventional wisdom holds that SGI's core market has traditionally been Hollywood visual effects studios.
Following the 2008 appeal by ATI over the validity of ('327) and Silicon Graphics Inc's voluntary dismissal of the ('376) patent from the lawsuit, the Federal Circuit upheld the jury verdict on the validity of GPHI's U.S.
In the mid-2000s the company repositioned itself as a supercomputer vendor, a move that also failed. On April 1, 2009, SGI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and announced that it would sell substantially all of its assets to Rackable Systems, a deal finalized on May 11, 2009, with Rackable assuming the name Silicon Graphics International.
The sale, ultimately for $42.5 million, was finalized on May 11, 2009; at the same time, Rackable announced their adoption of "Silicon Graphics International" as their global name and brand.
The Bankruptcy Court scheduled continuing proceedings and hearings for June 3 and 24, 2009, and July 22, 2009. After the Rackable acquisition, Vizworld magazine published a series of six articles that chronicle the downfall of SGI. Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquired Silicon Graphics International in November 2016, which allowed HPE to place the SGI Pleiades, a TOP500 supercomputer at NASA Ames Research Center, in its portfolio. ===Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc.
era=== During Silicon Graphics Inc.'s second bankruptcy phase, it was renamed to Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc.(GPHI) in June 2009. In 2010, GPHI announced it had won a significant favorable ruling in its litigation with ATI Technologies and AMD in June 2010, following the patent lawsuit originally filed during the Silicon Graphics, Inc.
era=== During Silicon Graphics Inc.'s second bankruptcy phase, it was renamed to Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc.(GPHI) in June 2009. In 2010, GPHI announced it had won a significant favorable ruling in its litigation with ATI Technologies and AMD in June 2010, following the patent lawsuit originally filed during the Silicon Graphics, Inc.
On January 31, 2011, the District Court entered an order that permits AMD to pursue its invalidity affirmative defense at trial and does not permit SGI to accuse AMD's Radeon R700 series of graphics products of infringement in this case.
On April 18, 2011, GPHI and AMD had entered into a confidential Settlement and License Agreement that resolved this litigation matter for an immaterial amount and that provides immunity under all GPHI patents for alleged infringement by AMD products, including components, software and designs.
On April 26, 2011, the Court entered an order granting the parties' agreed motion for dismissal and final judgment. In November 2011, GPHI filed another patent infringement lawsuit against Apple Inc.
patents 6,650,327 ('327), ('145) and ('881). In 2012, GPHI filed lawsuit against Apple, Sony, HTC Corp, LG Electronics Inc.
Support for these products would end after December 2013. SGI emerged from bankruptcy protection on October 17, 2006.
The Bankruptcy Court scheduled continuing proceedings and hearings for June 3 and 24, 2009, and July 22, 2009. After the Rackable acquisition, Vizworld magazine published a series of six articles that chronicle the downfall of SGI. Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquired Silicon Graphics International in November 2016, which allowed HPE to place the SGI Pleiades, a TOP500 supercomputer at NASA Ames Research Center, in its portfolio. ===Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc.
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