[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.