Linked by Eugenia Loli on Fri 26th Nov 2004 19:57 UTC, submitted by Dave Finger
The company is Silicon Graphics Incorporated, or SGI, which once was famous for its high-powered graphics and 3-D workstations but has fallen on hard times of late. SGI now focuses on supercomputers, but there's a tiny coterie of fans dedicated to keeping the company's aging but high-powered workstations alive. On a similar note, the every-three-months maintaince release of Irix is 3 months late.
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SGI simply cannot afford to employ a huge staff of engineers for R&D anymore. What you're seeing is that SGI will coopt off-the-shelf technologies as much as possible and apply their key IP to that. That is how we get Altix. They can't afford to continue MIPS development, so they've adapted to Itanium. They can't afford to really continue Irix development, so you're going to see a shift to Linux. I think there is probably bad blood at the management level between SGI and NVidia, so they'll work with someone like ATI to use their graphics chips. The profit margin on high end machines is a lot bigger also, so don't expect a lot on the workstation end. I think SGI will be around for as long as their interconnect has value. I also wouldn't be surprised if they rolled out an AMD version of the Altix platform--it can't be too hard.