[hapless]

Sun's last successful SPARC project was the UltraSPARC II, in 1997. Their subsequent projects, like "Rock" and "Niagara," were disasters. (USIII and USIV were little more than core shrinks of USII)

If Sun had given up the day Itanium was announced, they mighta come out ahead!

[panick21_]

Well technically successful maybe. But lots of people still bought their serves even after the bubble. And those server were expensive with good margin.

Giving up instantly when Itanium was announced would have just made them a company that waste a lot of money a lot of money on porting things to Itanium (and Sun had quite a lot of software that's not exactly easy to port). Only to not have a 64-bit system to build servers from. Essentially at best offering good x86 32-bit servers for the next couple years.

To be sure x86 workstations and servers should have been a big part of their strategy already in the late 90s. But that's not the same as adopting Itanium.

SGI did exactly what you suggest, give up on their chips and OS. This was terrible choice. Because Itanium was very late they had to restart MIPS development and were not able catch back up. Their Itanium products all didn't sell well even when they finally arrived.

[sillywalk]

They also didn't really invest in a next-generation graphics system. Just a rehash of the InfiniteReality.

SGI also did have X86 workstations, first with a proprietary SGI chipset that required as special HAL for NT/2K, and then just a standard PC workstation.

[hapless]

SGI was already moribund in 1997. Executives made a conscious choice to pivot. It didn't work out, but it is real hard for me to believe they could have done better with a redoubled focus on MIPS development they could not afford.

[sillywalk]

Yeah, in 1996 SGI bought Cray for $740 million. They got CrayLink/NumaLink, but also a big 64way SMP SPARC machine, which they sold to Sun for "significantly less than $100 million." Which became the Sun E10K, which made a lot of money.[0]

Then a bunch of the graphics people (who did the GPU for the Nintendo 64) went to found ArtX [1], which got bought by ATI.

There was also the ill-fated Fahrenheit project.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/2002/05/06/0506sun.html#703713c16a5e [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArtX

[panick21_]

Pretty sure 'CrayLink' was actually developed by SGI and just branded 'Cray'.

[sillywalk]

My bad; from wikipedia.. Looks like this[0] was considered NumaLink v1. Hooking up 16 SGI Iris'

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_DASH

[panick21_]

At least this proves that their marketing was successful :)

[panick21_]

They were forced to redouble on MIPS because Itanium was so late anyway. And even after Itanium came out making products around it took a while.

And I'm not saying not reacting to Itanium means go all in on your existing ISA and your existing business model. That wasn't my argument.

My argument was don't go all out on everything that currently makes you money and your costumers expect for a totally unproven architecture that even if it works out means that you are just gone be a commodity provider with commodity software. Something totally outside of the whole history of Silicon graphics.