John RegehrRE: https://vox.ominous.net/@occult/116317899239865990
SGI was way ahead of its time
https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes
Fabian Giesen
@regehr truly, the brand design of a company saying "we haven't gone bankrupt yet but we're thinking about it"
@regehr circular "I can't believe it's not a butthole" design aside, I liked the original SGI logo.
The logo they had before that with the gradients and the 3D-rendered Necker Cube was Very 90s (attached)
but the original one... I think that holds up. They should've gone back to that, maybe tweaked the font a little if they wanted to signal "this is the 2000s edition", but this was good!
@rygorous I know I've told this story before (and probably even to you) but a formative moment in my career was when ca. 1999 I was having dinner with someone fairly high up in the research / engineering wing of SGI, I asked how worried they were about the then-current graphics accelerator boards and the answer was "not even a little bit"
@rygorous regarding the logos, unless they go absolutely full butthole (hello claude and google authenticator!) I'm ok with it, like whatever, I mean if everything reminds us of assholes it's more about us (or our colleagues)
@regehr yeah it will forever be a mystery why asterisk-shaped logos for products helmed by sleazy breathless hype men make my mind go to "asshole" immediately
@regehr Yeah, a famous type of death spiral where you retreat upmarket until you're at the very top of end of the market only and when your competition comes for that too you have nowhere left to go
@regehr In this case, the thing to note too is that ex-SGI-ers ended up in basically every 3D accelerator startup ever.
To give two of the most clear spin-offs:
3dfx was, famously, founded by 3 ex-SGI engineers
ArtX (did the Gamecube/Wii GPUs, later bought by ATI) was 20 ex-SGI engineers and 2 ex-SGI executives
both mid-late 90s. So even if the people that ended up staying at SGI didn't see the way the wind was blowing, a lot of their people evidently did
Daniel Gibson@rygorous @regehr
apparently the whole SGI graphics team moved to nvidia in 1999: https://www.eetimes.com/sgi-graphics-team-moves-to-nvidia/
A year later nvidia bought 3dfx, which probably got him several ex-SGI people (unless they left, IDK)
@Doomed_Daniel @regehr what was left of it then, yeah. The 3dfx/ArtX things were earlier - 3dfx was founded 1994, ArtX 1997.
Notably SGI designed the graphics HW for the Nintendo 64 starting around '93 and released in '96. Presumably a lot of these people ended up going to ArtX?
@Doomed_Daniel @regehr My point being, it's not like they completely slept on consumer/commodity 3D.
They were there at ground zero, one of the first to ship consumer 3D mass-market HW with the Nintendo 64, and then evidently shrugged and decided "it will never catch on".
Per Vognsen@Doomed_Daniel @rygorous @regehr It's one of the classic components of the innovator's dilemma theory. Companies understandably don't want to cannibalize their existing high-margin, low-volume market.
@pervognsen @rygorous @regehr
I guess sometimes "if we don't do it, someone else will" would've been a good reason to do something
I guess sometimes "if we don't do it, someone else will" would've been a good reason to do something
Tom Forsyth@Doomed_Daniel @pervognsen @rygorous @regehr My assumption was always that the SGI engineers split into two camps - one that left to create many of the 3D startups, and the other that just wanted a quiet life of rest'n'vest. So it's not blindness - the second group just didn't want an exciting life.
@Doomed_Daniel @pervognsen @rygorous @regehr But yes it is odd that SGI *had* a huge market of far cheaper workstations - the Indigo line. But their efforts to shrink the HW to fit were odd. There was still a huge gap between the cheapest, which were 100% SW, and then the version with any HW at all, which was still very expensive. I never understood quite why.
@TomF @Doomed_Daniel @pervognsen @regehr it's also worth pointing out that the Reality Engine was codenamed "Venice" and they later did a cost-reduced version codenamed "VTX" which apparently expanded to "Venice Too eXpensive"
@TomF @Doomed_Daniel @pervognsen @regehr also if you look up Wikipedia for the successor design (InfiniteReality) you start seeing hints of a block diagram that is very familiar if you've worked in The Biz
@rygorous @Doomed_Daniel @pervognsen @regehr Unsurprisingly, it almost directly maps to a Voodoo 1/2.
@TomF @Doomed_Daniel @pervognsen @regehr also the texture sampling pipelines of basically everything
@rygorous @Doomed_Daniel @pervognsen @regehr This reminds me - one interesting corner-cut on the N64 was the bilinear filtering. It did 3-tap instead of 4-tap. This means they only need 2 multipliers instead of 3, which is a decent area saving!
@rygorous @Doomed_Daniel @pervognsen @regehr On the other hand, it means that artists should be thinking about N64 textures as being a rhombus shape, not a square. Which would have made heads explode.
@rygorous @Doomed_Daniel @pervognsen @regehr I don't know of any other hardware that tried this - anybody remember any? Which is surprising because we saw ALL SORTS of crazy corners being cut in those early wild west days. I may have cut a few myself.
@Doomed_Daniel @pervognsen @rygorous @regehr IIRC the cheapest Indigo was a bizarre beast that only had an 8bpp framebuffer, but did have a geometry engine, and then (I think) had a raster engine with no texture hardware.
Which seems completely the wrong way round - T&L but no textures - except that it was used mainly for wireframe modelling, and those models were then textured & rendered on the much more expensive machines.
Hovav Shacham@TomF @Doomed_Daniel @pervognsen @rygorous @regehr Also the Indy, a tier below. (“An Indigo without the ‘go,’” the joke went.)
@Doomed_Daniel @rygorous feel like it's some pretty classic innovator dilemma shit
crzwdjk ✅ @Doomed_Daniel @rygorous @regehr There were definitely a few guys at nvidia circa 2007 who still had their SGI name plates on their cubes.
synlogic4242@synlogic4242 @regehr literally everyone [ed. from the graphics division that is] who hadn't moved on by 1999, see elsethread https://www.eetimes.com/sgi-graphics-team-moves-to-nvidia/
Alex Rosenberg