Hacker News Reader

Comment by vrinsd | Hacker News Reader

I believe nVidia was started with a lot of SGI's core technology ; not "I have a good idea and I can't do it here" and more like "let me just take this stuff I doubt anyone will notice". I think SGI sued but didn't really pursue the matter because they didn't really see nVidia as a threat. I think Jensen was pivotal in this "technology transfer".

Regarding computing cycles, boom/bust, I recently re-read Soul of New Machine and was struck by how much the world has NOT changed. Sure we're not talking about micro/mini-computers and writing micro-coded assembly but the whole "the market is pivoting and we need to ride this wave" and "work like a dog to meet some almost unobtainum goal" seems to still underpin being an engineer in "tech" today.

View on HN

(1999) https://www.eetimes.com/sgi-graphics-team-moves-to-nvidia/

I love "Soul of New Machine" too. It was a blast to read. It even made me ponder the possibility to start over at 40+ and do something hardware-wise (or very low-level software). Of course I then found myself drown by 2 mortgages and dropped the thought.

From my reading SGI was already dead and falling apart by that time. If you look at 3D, SGI had two graphics architectures in the 90s: RealityEngine from 1992 and InfiniteReality from 1996. They never managed to release a follow-up to IR. Similarly everything that came after about 1996-97 was a refresh of a prior product with only marginal changes. And then they went bankrupt in the early 2000s. So SGI had really only a very brief productive period that was over by the second half of the 1990s.

SGI also never had a presence in business critical applications which gave some of the other vendors more momentum (HP-UX/PA-RISC, VMS/Alpha, Solaris/SPARC).

I worked at SGI on the next generation (code named Bali) in 1998 (whole year as an intern) and 1999 (part time while finishing my degree, flying back and forth from Australia). Bali was revolutionary. The goal was realtime Renderman and it really would. I had an absolute blast. I ended up designing the highspeed data paths (shader operations) for world's first floating point frame buffer (FP16 though we called it S10E5) with the logic on embedded DRAM for maximum floating point throughput. It was light years ahead of its time. But the plug got pulled just as we were taping out. Most of the team ended up at Nvidia or ArtX/ATI. The GPU industry was a small world of engineers back then. We'd have house parties with GPU engineers across all the company names you'd expect, and with beer flowing sometimes maybe a few secrets could eh spill. We had an immersive room to give visual demos and Stephen Hawking came in once pitching for a discount.

For team building, we launched potato canons into NASA Moffet field, blew up or melted Sun machines for fun with thermite and explosives. Lots of amazing people and fond memories for a kid getting started.

Very cool. Was Bali going to be the next high-end architecture after InfiniteReality? (I think IR was code-named “Kona” so the tropical codenames fit)

Why did they cancel it, money running out? It’s sad to think they were close to a new architecture but then just kept selling IR for years (and even sold a FireGL-based “Onyx” by the end).

Also was it a separate team working on the lower-end graphics like VPro/Odyssey?

Yes Bali was the next gen architecture and incredibly scalable. It consisted of many different chips connected together in a network that could scale. The R chip was so big existing tools couldn't handle it and ppl were writing their own tools. As a result it was very expensive to tape out so many hefty chips and I think that's why when it came time, and with a financial crisis, upper management pulled the plug.

Yes there were separate teams working on the lower-end graphics.

Why was Bali cancelled?

Well,

Most Hollywood effects were all done on SGI systems before the slow migration to Linux. Renderman, Maya, were all SGI first-party programs.

Also SGI made huge advances in NUMA and machines with dozens of CPUs/processors before most other companies ventured into this space.

But not business critical like IBM CICS or Java.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMAlink

2. https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~bhuyan/CS213/2004/numalink.pdf

3. https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/fa12/cse260-b/Lectures/Lec17...

The large Origin servers and the nice indigo workstations at trade fairs with their cool real time visualizations comes into my mind. Also applications like Softimage, the 4Dwm desktop ...

Later the large Altix NUMA systems with core counts in unprecedented sizes (and problems booting due to lock contention ;)

And of course their donation of the XFS filesystem to the linux world!

The N and the V in Nvidia stood for "New Version" of SGI firmware.

The Nvidia lawsuit is discussed in the article.

I mean there's more to it. NVidia literally just took SGI's IP. Only more blatant start was Cisco, where they straight stole a University computer.

Cisco was started by a husband/wife team who were the heads of IT for the Stanford Electrical Engineering School and Business School respectively. Anecdotally, they first developed the technology trying to connect the networks for both schools.

where can i read about this cisco thing?

https://www.tcracs.org/tcrwp/1origin-of-cisco/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com