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Silicon Graphics

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Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Information
Industry Computer hardware, 3D computer graphics, high-performance computing
Founded 1982
Founder Jim Clark
Headquarters Mountain View, California, United States (Sunnyvale, California by 2009)
Notable Personnel Jim Clark (founder), Kurt Akeley (founding team member, later vice president and chief engineer), Thomas Jermoluk (president)
Products IRIS workstations, Indigo, Indy, Onyx, RealityEngine, InfiniteReality, IRIX, IRIS GL, OpenGL, IRIS Performer


Silicon Graphics (Silicon Graphics, Inc., usually abbreviated SGI) was an American maker of computer workstations, servers and supercomputers built for real-time 3D graphics. Jim Clark, an electrical engineering professor at Stanford University, founded the company in 1982, and it was based in Mountain View, California.[1][2] Its machines rendered the images for several well-documented virtual reality systems of the late 1980s and 1990s. VPL Research's RB2 used two Silicon Graphics IRIS computers, one for each eye.[3] The CAVE at the University of Illinois at Chicago used four Silicon Graphics workstations, one per projection screen.[4] Disney's 1994-1995 Aladdin VR attraction at EPCOT rendered each guest's view on a custom Silicon Graphics computer with three RealityEngine pipelines.[5]

The company also created the OpenGL graphics interface, which it introduced in 1992 and which grew out of its own IRIS GL library.[6][7] Silicon Graphics filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection twice, in 2006 and 2009.[8] In May 2009 it sold substantially all of its assets to Rackable Systems, which renamed itself SGI. Hewlett Packard Enterprise bought that successor company in 2016.[1][9]

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Corporate history, SGI products and their use in VPL RB2, Boeing VSX, the CAVE and Disney Aladdin checked against Britannica, SEC filings, SIGGRAPH papers and press sources. About review dates.

History

Founding and early products

Britannica's account says Clark started the company after concluding that desktop computers needed to draw images quickly and in three-dimensional detail, which until then had been possible only on multimillion-dollar supercomputers. Scientists and engineers building 3D software for corporate and military research were expected to be the main customers.[1] The technical basis was the Geometry Engine, a special-purpose chip that Clark and Marc Hannah developed at Stanford around 1981. It handled matrix transformations, clipping and the mapping of coordinates to the output device. Jon Peddie describes it as the first dedicated vertex processor, a function later built into GPUs. Peddie dates the company's formation to 1981. SGI's first workstation line, IRIS (Integrated Raster Imaging System), was built around the chip.[10] Kurt Akeley joined Clark on the founding team in 1982 and designed the frame buffers and processor subsystems for the early IRIS products. He later had primary design responsibility for most of SGI's high-end graphics systems, including the GTX, VGX and RealityEngine.[2]

Clark had already worked with head-mounted displays. At SIGGRAPH 1976 he presented a film and paper on an experimental system for designing three-dimensional parametric surfaces in real time. The user shaped the surfaces with a 3-D "wand" and viewed them through a head-mounted display. A PDP-10 computer calculated the wand and head positions every 1/30 of a second, and an LDS-1 display computer drew line renderings of the surfaces inside the display's 40-degree field of view.[11]

Growth (1984-1996)

According to Britannica, SGI gave the first prototype of its workstation to George Lucas free of charge in 1984. Film and television work later became a major market for the company; Toy Story (1995), the first feature-length animated film made entirely by computer, was produced on SGI computers.[1] SGI went public in 1986. In 1987 it introduced its first UNIX workstation built on RISC microprocessors, and it bought MIPS Computer Systems, the designer of those chips, in 1992.[1]

By mid-1994 SGI had about 4,400 full-time employees. Its product range then ran from the Indigo family of desktop workstations (Indy and Indigo2) to the Onyx and POWER Onyx "graphics supercomputers" and the Challenge servers. All of them used MIPS processors and SGI's IRIX operating system, a version of UNIX System V Release 4.[12] The same filing described partnerships with Time Warner Cable, Nintendo, the Walt Disney Company, AT&T and NTT. For Nintendo, SGI was developing the core components of the Ultra 64 console: the CPU, a media co-processor, operating system software and multimedia libraries. Nintendo paid for the development work and was to pay SGI royalties.[12] In 1995 SGI merged with the 3D software companies Alias Research and Wavefront Technologies, and in 1996 it bought the supercomputer maker Cray Research for 767 million US dollars.[1]

Decline, bankruptcy and asset sale (1994-2009)

Clark left in 1994 to found Mosaic Communications (later Netscape). SGI president Thomas Jermoluk also left to help found Home Network. Britannica writes that SGI missed the early market for Internet servers and began losing money in 1997. Cray's supercomputer business was shrinking as defense and petrochemical customers cut research budgets. In response SGI signed agreements with Microsoft and Intel to sell workstations running Windows NT on Intel processors, and in 1998 it reorganized its chip division as an independent company, MIPS Technologies.[1]

On 8 May 2006 Silicon Graphics and several subsidiaries filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The company emerged from bankruptcy on 17 October 2006.[8] It filed for Chapter 11 again in New York on 1 April 2009. On the same day Rackable Systems announced an agreement to buy substantially all of its assets for about 25 million US dollars in cash plus certain liabilities. The announcement described SGI as a high-performance computing company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.[13] The sale of substantially all of the company's assets, excluding certain intellectual property assets, closed on 8 May 2009 at 42.5 million US dollars in cash plus the assumption of certain liabilities, after approval by the bankruptcy court. SGI's stockholders received nothing from the sale.[9] InfoWorld reported that the price rose from 25 million to 42.5 million US dollars during the bankruptcy auction. Rackable renamed the combined company SGI; its chief executive, Mark Barrenechea, said the SGI name was better known in Europe and Asia.[14] The successor operated as Silicon Graphics International, a separate company from the original Silicon Graphics, Inc.[1][15]

The original corporation stayed on file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission under the name Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc. EDGAR lists "Silicon Graphics Inc" as its former name, used until 4 June 2009.[15] Hewlett Packard Enterprise completed its purchase of Silicon Graphics International on 1 November 2016, paying 7.75 US dollars per share.[16] TechCrunch had reported the deal, announced in August 2016, as worth 275 million US dollars.[17] TOP500 put the final purchase price at just over 283 million US dollars.[16]

Products

The table lists the SGI hardware and software discussed in this article.

Product Type Introduced Notes
IRIS series Graphics workstations 1980s First workstation line, built around the Geometry Engine chip[10]
IRIS GL Graphics library Before 1992 SGI's proprietary 3D programming interface; the basis of OpenGL[7]
Onyx Multiprocessor "graphics supercomputer" January 1993 Graphics options from Extreme to RealityEngine2; in 1994, 24-processor RealityEngine2 rack systems started at about 644,000 US dollars[12]
RealityEngine Graphics subsystem 1993 (SIGGRAPH paper) Up to 353 processors; more than 1 million antialiased, texture-mapped triangles per second[18]
OpenGL Graphics API 1992 Open, cross-platform successor to IRIS GL; control passed to the Khronos Group in 2006[6]
POWER Onyx Graphics supercomputer July 1994 MIPS R8000 processors; one to twelve processors[12]
IRIS Performer Real-time 3D toolkit 1994 (SIGGRAPH paper) Scene-graph toolkit for visual simulation and virtual reality[19]
Onyx InfiniteReality Visualization supercomputer Shipping by April 1996 Successor to Onyx RealityEngine2; aimed at simulator image generation[20]

RealityEngine and InfiniteReality

Kurt Akeley's SIGGRAPH 1993 paper called RealityEngine "the first of a new generation of systems designed primarily to render texture mapped, antialiased polygons." In its largest configuration it used 353 independent processors and had a measured fill rate of more than 240 million antialiased, texture-mapped pixels per second. Besides ordinary workstation use, the paper says, the system enabled real-time "out-the-window" image generation and interactive image processing.[18] SGI's 1994 annual report listed visual simulation and interactive entertainment among the applications the Onyx line was suited for.[12]

Flight International reported in April 1996 that SGI had begun shipping Onyx InfiniteReality and was pitching it directly against simulator image generators from Evans & Sutherland and Lockheed Martin. SGI said the system was up to 100 times faster than the Onyx RealityEngine2 it replaced. It could draw more than 10 million polygons per second, fill more than 800 million textured, antialiased pixels per second, and run with 2 to 24 MIPS R10000 processors. Early users included Hughes Training, which was building F-16 trainers for Denmark, and Saab, for a JAS 39 Gripen development simulator.[20]

OpenGL and IRIS Performer

Mark Segal and Kurt Akeley's 1994 paper on the design of OpenGL states that the interface is based on IRIS GL. SGI had decided against a completely new API because IRIS GL showed what programmers wanted, and because staying close to it made OpenGL easier for the many existing IRIS GL developers to adopt.[7] The Khronos Group dates OpenGL's introduction by SGI to 1992. In a press release dated 31 July 2006, Khronos announced that the OpenGL Architecture Review Board had voted to transfer control of the standard to the Khronos Group.[6]

IRIS Performer, described at SIGGRAPH 1994 by John Rohlf and James Helman, was "a toolkit for visual simulation, virtual reality, and other real-time 3D graphics applications." It combined a low-level library for high-performance rendering with a high-level library that carried out pipelined, parallel traversals of a hierarchical scene graph. The paper gives its principal design goal as helping developers obtain maximal performance from 3D graphics workstations with multiple CPUs.[19]

XR work

Rendering for 1980s-1990s VR systems

In a 1990 paper, Chuck Blanchard, Ann Lasko-Harvill and Lou Ellyn Jones described VPL's RB2 ("Reality Built for Two"), which VPL first showed on 7 June 1989. An RB2 setup included a DataGlove, an EyePhone head-mounted display, and two Silicon Graphics IRIS computers that rendered the virtual world in real time, one for each eye. A Macintosh II design and control workstation connected to the IRIS machines over Ethernet. VPL's rendering program, ISAAC, ran on the IRIS computers.[3] Boeing's VSX demonstration at SIGGRAPH 1991 was built from VPL components. A Macintosh IIfx handled the DataGlove and EyePhones, while two Silicon Graphics 4D/300-series VGX workstations, again one per eye, drew the images. The Boeing authors noted that the Mac was "at least an order of magnitude slower" than similar software running on VGX-class machines.[21]

The 1993 SIGGRAPH paper on the CAVE by Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel J. Sandin and Thomas A. DeFanti states that "four Silicon Graphics high-end workstations create the imagery (one for each screen)", with a fifth handling input devices and synchronization. Head and hand tracking came from Polhemus or Ascension Technology sensors.[4] The authors used the window projection function in SGI's Graphics Library (GL) to produce the off-axis perspective that each wall needed. UNIX could not keep the four screens synchronized within the 8 milliseconds required, so, at the suggestion of Silicon Graphics staff, the team linked the workstations with reflective memory. The paper's acknowledgments list Silicon Graphics Computer Systems among the companies providing equipment support.[4]

Disney's Aladdin attraction

The 1994 annual report describes how SGI technology powered the Walt Disney Imagineering Labs, which opened at Epcot Center in Orlando in July 1994. There, visitors could "fly" through scenes from Aladdin. SGI presented the project as an example of how its technology could reach location-based entertainment.[12] The Disney researchers' SIGGRAPH 1996 paper says the head-mounted display system ran at EPCOT from 1 July 1994 to 8 September 1995 and that more than 45,000 guests tried it. Each guest's view came from a custom Silicon Graphics computer with eight 150 MHz MIPS R4400 CPUs, 512 megabytes of RAM, 16 megabytes of texture memory and three RealityEngine pipelines. Each pipeline drew 20 frames per second, and interleaving the three gave a 60 Hz frame rate. Disney's scene and animation software ran on top of SGI Performer.[5]

Other immersive and simulation work

Linda Jacobson told the Voices of VR podcast in 2017 that she joined SGI in August 1995 to sell "high-end real-time graphics and high-end immersive peripherals" to different vertical segments.[22] Flight International reported that Hughes Training used RealityEngine2 systems for host computing and image generation in US Air Force F-16 and F-15 training devices.[20]

Legacy

The Science Museum Group collection in the United Kingdom includes an Onyx RealityEngine2 system, credited as courtesy of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The collection record lists it as a computer graphics processor made by Silicon Graphics in California in the 1990s and describes the Onyx II as a high-powered 3D graphics processor for rendering and advanced simulation.[23]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Mark Hall. "SGI". Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/money/SGI. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "SIGGRAPH 1995 Computer Graphics Achievement Award: Akeley". ACM SIGGRAPH History Archives. https://history.siggraph.org/?p=35584. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Chuck Blanchard, Ann Lasko-Harvill, Lou Ellyn Jones (1990). "What's New in Reality Built for Two". Ars Electronica 1990 festival catalog. Ars Electronica. https://webarchive.ars.electronica.art/en/archives/festival_archive/festival_catalogs/festival_artikel.asp%3FiProjectID=8974.html. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel J. Sandin, Thomas A. DeFanti (1993). "Surround-Screen Projection-Based Virtual Reality: The Design and Implementation of the CAVE". SIGGRAPH '93 Proceedings (ACM), pp. 135-142. doi:10.1145/166117.166134. https://www.evl.uic.edu/documents/siggraph93-cave-cruz-neira.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Randy Pausch, Jon Snoddy, Robert Taylor, Scott Watson, Eric Haseltine (1996). "Disney's Aladdin: First Steps Toward Storytelling in Virtual Reality". SIGGRAPH '96 Proceedings (ACM), pp. 193-203. https://doi.org/10.1145/237170.237257. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 "OpenGL ARB to Pass Control of OpenGL Specification to Khronos Group". Khronos Group. 2006-07-31. https://www.khronos.org/news/press/opengl_arb_to_pass_control_of_opengl_specification_to_khronos_group. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Mark Segal, Kurt Akeley (1994). "The Design of the OpenGL Graphics Interface". Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. https://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448a-01-fall/design_opengl.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 "Silicon Graphics, Inc. Form 8-K (Chapter 11 status and monthly operating report)". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR. 2006-11-16. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/802301/000119312506237285/d8k.htm. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 "Silicon Graphics, Inc. Form 8-K (completion of asset sale to Rackable Systems)". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR. 2009-05-13. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000802301/000095010309001099/dp13469_8k.htm. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Jon Peddie (2020-09-24). "Famous Graphics Chips: Geometry Engine". IEEE Computer Society. https://computer.org/publications/tech-news/chasing-pixels/geometry-engine. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  11. ↑ James H. Clark. "Three-dimensional man-machine interaction". ACM SIGGRAPH History Archives (SIGGRAPH 1976 technical papers). https://history.siggraph.org/?p=102055. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 "Silicon Graphics, Inc. Annual Report (Form 10-K) for fiscal year 1994". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR. 1994-09-28. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/802301/0000912057-94-003243.txt. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  13. ↑ "Rackable Systems Announces Agreement to Acquire Silicon Graphics Inc.". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR (Exhibit 99.1). 2009-04-01. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000802301/000095010309000713/dp13016_ex9901.htm. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  14. ↑ James Niccolai (2009-05-11). "Rackable Systems becomes SGI, closes deal". InfoWorld. https://www.infoworld.com/article/2632392/rackable-systems-becomes-sgi--closes-deal.html. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 "Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc. (CIK 0000802301) company filings". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000802301. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Michael Feldman (2016-11-01). "HPE and SGI Become One". TOP500. https://top500.org/news/hpe-and-sgi-become-one. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  17. ↑ Brian Heater (2016-08-11). "Hewlett Packard Enterprise picks up SGI for $275 million". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/11/hpe-sgi/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Kurt Akeley (1993). "Reality Engine graphics". SIGGRAPH '93 Proceedings (ACM), pp. 109-116. doi:10.1145/166117.166131. https://history.siggraph.org/?p=118597. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 John Rohlf, James Helman (1994). "IRIS Performer: a high performance multiprocessing toolkit for real-time 3D graphics". SIGGRAPH '94 Proceedings (ACM), pp. 381-394. doi:10.1145/192161.192262. https://history.siggraph.org/?p=119722. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 "SGI aims high with InfiniteReality". Flight International. FlightGlobal. 1996-04-03. https://flightglobal.com/sgi-aims-high-with-infinitereality/9897.article. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  21. ↑ Meredith Bricken, Chris Esposito, Keith Butler (1991). "The Boeing VSX: Operations with Virtual Aircraft in Virtual Space". ACM SIGGRAPH History Archives (SIGGRAPH 1991 demonstrations). https://history.siggraph.org/?p=125236. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  22. ↑ Kent Bye (2017-12-08). "#601: VR in the 90s: Bootstrapping the Commercial VR Industry". Voices of VR. https://voicesofvr.com/601-vr-in-the-90s-bootstrapping-the-commercial-vr-industry. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  23. ↑ "Onyx Reality Engine 2, 1990-1999". Science Museum Group Collection. Science Museum Group. https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8358997. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
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