SGI terminates graphics efforts, division eliminated

Vizworld.com broke this news on Friday, and today we’ve talked to current and former employees who confirmed that SGI’s recently resurrected graphics efforts, including the VUE line of software, is now dead

Silicon Graphics, what a tangled web you wove.. From the old days of the Infinite Reality cards, you were the name in computer graphics.  Seems that legacy has come to an end.  I’m hearing from people within SGI that, as of Monday, the entire graphics division has been eliminated.  That includes everyone from the Vice President of the graphics division on down to the engineers.

Of course, before it was a supercomputing company SGI was exclusively a graphics company, shipping its first 3D graphics station in April of 1984. They moved away from graphics and visualization entirely in the early 2000s (I think it was the 2003-2005 timeframe, anyone know for sure?). Shortly after he returned to the company as CEO in Apr of 2007, I was in the audience at IDC’s HPC User Forum as Bo Ewald announced to those assembled that SGI was headed “back in the visual supercomputing business” and went on to say that “it was really stupid for the company to stop doing visualization types of things.” We have sent an email to SGI asking for their official word on the subject, and we’ll update this post when we hear back.

If you want to walk down SGI’s memory lane, you might want to revisit the visual timeline I created in April of this year that documents the company from founding through to the second bankruptcy filing.