sgi_cube_logoShortly after I published my SGI Special Edition Podcast, I was contacted by a former SGI Engineer (who preferred to remain Anonymous) with several stories to tell of what happened to SGI. It’s an amazing story full of minor hardware glitches that wound up costing millions, bone-headed oversights during acquisitions, and basic mismanagement of a billion dollar company. The story is far too long and involved for a single post, so I’ll be adding it in chapters over the next few days. So come on inside and witness the saga of what really happened to SGI over the years.. The story has never been told, until now. We’ll begin at the Top:

Chapter 1: Management

Chapter 2: The Acquisitions

Chapter 3: Hardware Problems

1. Faulty Power Supplies

In Mid-2000, SGI had several of the Octane, Onyx, and Challenge systems in the wild.  One day, users starting receiving letters like this one:

"The power supplies may attain high temperatures because of high
electrical looses in the magnetic cores. This in turn may cause the
insulation material  in the cores to smoke, and on occasion, to
flame.  The flames may escape to the outside of the computer. The smoke is
a health hazard and sometimes, a potential shock hazard may be present."

According to our inside source, SGI actually had a few facilities catch fire before the problem was located.  SGI wound up spending millions on recalls and replacements of all these power supplies.

As a funny, almost prophetic, aside to this, the SGI Marketing department ordered lighters made to look like Octanes to use for promotional giveaways. After one of the buildings storing the lighters caught fire and nearly burnt to the ground, the lighters were scrapped, never having seen the light of day.  Correction: It was a customer’s building that caught on fire from a defective Octane power supply that caused the lighters to be destroyed.  Considering Octanes’ were torching buildings, handing out Octane shaped Zippos’ was considered to be VERY uncool by corporate marketing.

2. The Indigo2

indigo2-1901-frontMany people got their start with SGI hardware on an Indigo2.  However, closer inspection of the life of the Indigo2 reveals a few critical problems. [1]

First, the video cards that came with the Indigo2 where woefully inadequate.  Over the entire lifetime of the system, they never exceeded 4MB of texture memory.  Granted, cards from NVidia at the time (the Riva128) also had 4MB of memory max, but SGI could have at least offered more memory to their higher-end users who were willing to pay a premium price for it.

Even aside from the texture memory limitations, in 1996 SGI found that the R10K CPU’s they received from NEC were faulty and would randomly shut down.  They had no choice but to replace all the units in the field (Approxinately 4000) at a cost of $10M. [2,3]  Later in 1998,  they eventually found a floating-point bug with the R8000 chip, that forced them to upgrade customers (For free) to R10000 chips, leading to emails like this:

SGI has offered to upgrade Octopus from its existing 90MHz R8000 CPU
configuration to 195MHz R10000 CPU's for no cost to JCU.  The R10000 is the
current generation processor used in all SGI's high end machines.  SGI have
made the offer to two reasons:

	o First to ensure that a rare and specific bug in floating point
	  calculation that has been found in some older R8000 systems does
	  not become an issue at JCU.  I have run tests on Octopus and
	  it would seem that this bug is not an issue for us at JCU.

	o Second to upgrade the Power Challenge so that remains at a modern
	  level of performance and compatibility.

All in all this is a generous offer from SGI (valued at ~$300,000) that we
should gladly accept.

This cost millions as well.

3. The 1600SW LCD

1600sw_smIn 1998, display technology was largely dominated by massive CRT’s.  SGI bucked the trend by releasing the 1600SW LCD, a 17.3inch 1600×1024  TFT LCD display for approximately $2500.  The display won several awards, both for design and technical achievement.  However, it’s introduction was marred by the use of the OpenLDi connector.  What’s that? You’ve never heard of OpenLDI?  No surprise, only 3 cards were ever designed to support it, and 2 of those were a special edition for this particular monitor.  In fact, our insider tells us that SGI had to loan Number9 $7million to continue producing the cards, with a provision to own 25% of Number9 should they not be able to repay in 90days.

The OpenLDI interface severely restricted the usefulness of the monitor.  No matter how many awards it won, SGI was unable to convince customers to buy special video cards (adding even more to the high cost of the monitor) just for the 17.3″ monitor (when most designers were using 21″ CRT’s).  Less than a year after the monitor was released, it was abandoned by SGI. It eventually re-emerged around 2001 with a special “multi-link” adapter (another $400) allowing analog signals to be converted into the OpenLDI interface.  But by then, LCD’s were becoming more commonplace with more options.

The 1600SW LCD is still widely considered a fantastic monitor, if you can find the time and resources to actually connect one.  SGI no longer manufacturers or sells the monitors, adapters, or cables, but there is a thriving underground market amongst SGI fans and enthusiasts.

But while SGI ran into alot of problems with faulty hardware, costing millions to repair, they spent even more money on ventures that never materialized.

  • Be sure to come back and see Chapter 4 : False Starts.  You can follow the entire series via the sgi-bts (behind the scenes) Tag.

References

[1] SGIStuff – Hardware – Machines – Indigo2

[2] CNet News – Insult & Injury piling on SGI – Sep 26 2996

[3] New York TImes – Silicon Graphics Shares fall on Outlook – Sep 27 2996

[4] Wikipedia – SGI 1600SW

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