Motorola 680x0-based systems SGI's first generation products, starting with the
IRIS (Integrated Raster Imaging System) 1000 series of high-performance graphics terminals, were based on the
Motorola 68000 family of
microprocessors. 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 used 8 MHz Motorola 68000 CPUs with of RAM and had no
disk drives. They booted over the network It was capable of approximately 6 million operations per second. Later 1000-series machines, the 1400 and 1500, ran at 10 MHz and had 1.5 MB of RAM. The 1400 had a 72 MB
ST-506 disk drive, while the 1500 had a 474 MB SMD-based disk drive with a
Xylogics 450 disk controller. They may have used the PM2 CPU and PM2M1 RAM board from the 2000 series. SGI began using the
UNIX System V operating system. 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). All used the Excelan EXOS/201 Ethernet card, the same graphics hardware (GF2 Frame Buffer, UC4 Update Controller, DC4 Display Controller, BP3 Bitplane). Their main differences were the CPU, RAM, and
Weitek Floating Point Accelerator boards, disk controllers and disk drives (both
ST-506 and
SMD were available). These could be upgraded, for example from a 2400 to a 2400T. The 2500 and 2500T had a larger chassis, a standard 6' 19" EIA rack with space at the bottom for two SMD disk drives weighing approximately each. The non-Turbo models used the
Multibus for the CPU to communicate with the floating point accelerator, while the Turbos added a ribbon cable dedicated for this. 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. The standard monitor was a 19" 60 Hz non-interlaced unit with a tilt/swivel base; 19" 30 Hz interlaced and a 15" 60 Hz non-interlaced (with tilt/swivel base) were also available. The IRIS 3130 and its smaller siblings were impressive for the time, being complete
UNIX workstations. The 3130 was powerful enough to support a complete 3D animation and rendering package without mainframe support. 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 3,500 systems shipped of all 2000 and 3000 models combined.
RISC era With the introduction of the IRIS 4D series, SGI switched to
MIPS microprocessors. These machines were more powerful and came with powerful on-board floating-point capability. 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. 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. SGI used the R4000 in its
Crimson workstation. 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 console itself was later released in 1996. The RCP was developed by SGI's Nintendo Operations department, led by engineer
Dr. Wei Yen. 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 its intent to phase out MIPS in its systems. Development of new MIPS microprocessors stopped, and the existing
R12000 design was extended multiple times until 2003 to provide existing customers more time to migrate to Itanium. In August 2006, SGI announced the end of production for MIPS/IRIX systems, and by the end of the year MIPS/IRIX products were no longer generally available from SGI.
IRIS GL and OpenGL Until the second generation Onyx
Reality Engine machines, SGI offered access to its high performance 3D graphics subsystems through a proprietary
API known as
IRIS Graphics Library (
IRIS GL). As more features were added over the years, IRIS GL became harder to maintain and more cumbersome to use. 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. – OpenGL remained the only real-time 3D graphics standard to be portable across a variety of operating systems. Its intent was to introduce workstations based on the
MIPS architecture and able to run
Windows NT and
SCO UNIX. The group produced the
Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) specification,
Entertainment industry For eight consecutive years (1995–2002), all films nominated for an
Academy Award for Distinguished Achievement in Visual Effects were created on Silicon Graphics computer systems. 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. Ross (
Laura Linney) to communicate via satellite to TraviCom HQ. The purple, lowercased "
sgi" logo can be seen at the beginning of the opening credits of the
HBO series
Silicon Valley, before being taken down and replaced by the
Google logo as the intro graphics progress. Google leased the former SGI buildings in 2003 for its headquarters in
Mountain View, CA until it 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. Many SGI graphics engineers left to work at other computer graphics companies such as
ATI and
Nvidia, contributing to the PC 3D graphics revolution.
Free software SGI was a promoter of
free software, supporting several projects such as
Linux and
Samba, and opening some of its own previously proprietary code such as the
XFS filesystem and the
Open64 compiler. SGI was also important in its contribution to the C++
Standard Template Library (STL) with many useful extensions in the
MIT-like licensed SGI STL implementation. 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. In June 2004 SGI sold the business, later renamed to
Alias/Wavefront, to the private equity investment firm Accel-
KKR for $57.5 million. 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. Three months later, it sold the
Cray Business Systems Division, responsible for the
CS6400 SPARC/
Solaris server, to
Sun Microsystems for an undisclosed amount (acknowledged later by a Sun executive to be "significantly less than $100 million"). Many of the
Cray T3E engineers designed and developed the
SGI Altix and
NUMAlink technology. 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. The product line was discontinued in June 2001.
SGI Visual Workstations Another attempt by SGI in the late 1990s to introduce its own family of Intel-based workstations running
Windows NT or
Red Hat Linux (see also
SGI Visual Workstation) proved to be a financial disaster, and shook customer confidence in SGI's commitment to its own MIPS-based line.
Switch to Itanium In 1998, SGI announced that future generations of its machines would be based not on its own MIPS processors, but the upcoming "super-chip" from
Intel, code-named "Merced" and later called
Itanium. Funding for its own high-end processors was reduced, and it was planned that the
R10000 would be the last MIPS mainstream processor.
MIPS Technologies would focus entirely on the embedded market, where it was having some success, and SGI would no longer have to fund development of a CPU that, since the failure of
ARC, found use only in its own machines. The
Origin 2000 server line was intended to get nodeboards loaded with Merced. Production and development delays in as early as 1999 made it clear that the Merced release was going to be delivered late. Stopgap MIPS CPUs, all refinements of the successful R10000 such as the
R12000,
R14000 and
R16000 were released. These were used in a series of MIPS servers and workstations from 1999 through 2006. SGI's first Itanium-based system was the short-lived SGI 750 workstation, launched in 2001. SGI's MIPS-based systems were not to be superseded until the launch of the
Itanium 2-based
Altix servers and
Prism workstations some time later. Unlike the MIPS systems, which ran
IRIX, the Itanium systems used
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server with SGI enhancements as its
operating system. SGI used
Transitive Corporation's
QuickTransit software to allow its old MIPS/IRIX applications to run (in emulation) on the new Itanium/Linux platform. In the server market, the Itanium 2-based Altix eventually replaced the MIPS-based Origin product line. 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 Altix had 512 Itanium processors running under a single instance of
Linux. A cluster of 20 machines was then the eighth-fastest
supercomputer. All faster supercomputers were clusters, but none have as many
FLOPS per machine. However, more recent supercomputers are very large clusters of machines that are individually less capable. 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. 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). The XE1200 and XE1300 servers used a cluster architecture. 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==