SGI: getting the "G" to stand for "graphics" again

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Remember when I reported from the HPC User Forum last month that CEO Bo Ewald had just told the audience that SGI was getting back into the visual supercomputing business? My favorite quote:

It was really stupid for the company to stop doing visualization types of things.

Well, I know a little birdy who’s at IEEE Vis this week. He ran into the SGI engineer in charge of developing their next generation graphics platform. This is what the birdy told me in an email today

I asked him about their CEO’s comments about getting back into the visual supercomputing business. He said that they were developing a new visual supercomputer based on the x86 architecture (no surprise there) using Intel’s Larabee project. The likely target date for us to see this computer is 2009, which corresponds to when Larabee is due. Until then they plan to use ATI/NVidia graphics cards. He says that the CEO believes they can retake the high-end graphics market.

For background here are some articles from ars technica on Larabee: one, two.

Thanks, birdy!