Soup of the Day

SGI, the end of an era?

1981 - 2006

SGI, or Silicon Graphics Inc., was once the holy grail of all 3D artists worldwide. One of the reasons I went to my University was to get to use the suite of SGI O2 machines they had. Silicon Graphics have been one of the companies at the forefront of computer generated imagery during its slow rise in the 1980’s and then explosion in the 1990’s.

SGI made their name creating systems and processor farms for generating computer imagery, supplying systems to almost every one of the major effects companies during the start of the 1990’s. Unlike the common desktops of the day, SGI created their own MIPS processors for their early machines, and built their own version of UNIX, called IRIX, to run on it.

In 1995, SGI purchases Alias Research (creator or Power Animator) and Wavefront Technologies to create a new company, Alias|Wavefront. Alias|Wavefront took most of the engine and tools from Power Animator combined with tools from Wavefront Technologies to create the widely used 3D application, Maya. Maya has become arguably the most widely used 3D application for visual effects for both film and television. SoftImage, Lightwave and 3DS Max have gained some ground, but without a doubt Maya is by far the most used. SGI sold Alias (as it was then known) to an external investment firm in 2004. Alias has since been brought by AutoDesk, the makers of 3DS Max.

AutoDesk relied on SGI for a number of their products during this period. Flame, Inferno, Smoke, Flint, and Fire were all turnkey compositing and editing solutions that required SGI hardware one way or another. Flame and Inferno, AutoDesk’s flagship compositing products have since migrated away from SGI, both now running much faster on x686 architecture using the Linux operating system.

This is the problem that SGI began facing during the end of the 1990’s and into the 21st century, desktop PC computing power had caught up with SGI. SGI were one of the founders of OpenGL (a realtime 3D rendering engine), which was a key part of IRIX and every SGI machine had a custom built graphics card that enabled 3D objects to be manipulated and viewed in real time. In 1990 this was amazing. In 2000, every PC out there had a graphics card that could render OpenGL.

SGI also had a large foothold, alongside Sun Microsystems, in the cluster market. The Onyx systems (there is an Onyx3000 cluster of 16 towers, each with 128 procssors, about 20 metres from where I am sitting) were powerhouses for scientific computational departments. Huge monolithic boxes would crush gigantic scientific problems. However, IBM and Sun where early competitors and recently clusters of PC’s/Mac’s running Mac OS X or Linux can produce the same power for a fraction of the price.

So maybe it is no surprise that last week SGI filed Chapter 11 for bankcruptsy in the US. Or is it? Well, Sun who in many ways had a similar business model to SGI are still alive an kicking. Unfortunately I feel that this is purely a symptom of SGI’s complacent attitude to the market. When the markets started to shift away from high-end machines to desktop machines, SGI should have adapted, rather than assuming that their brand was enough to save them. Unfortunately this is never the case and I would be surprised if we see a resurgance of SGI.

However, SGI has given the community a lot over the years and it shouldn’t be forgotten that Inferno, Flame, Flint, Smoke, Maya and many more 3D applications would not exist if it wasn’t for SGI.

RIP Silicon Graphics Inc, 1981 - 2006