Through the mid to late-1990s, the rapidly improving performance of commodity Wintel machines began to erode SGI's stronghold in the 3D market.

The remnants of Silicon Graphics, Inc. became Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc. James H. Clark left his position as an electrical engineering associate professor at Stanford University to found SGI in 1982 along with a group of seven graduate students and research staff from Stanford University: Kurt Akeley, David J.

Brown, Tom Davis, Rocky Rhodes, Marc Hannah, Herb Kuta, and Mark Grossman;[3] along with Abbey Silverstone[4] and a few others.

The porting of Maya to Linux, Mac OS and Microsoft Windows further eroded the low end of SGI's product line.

In response to challenges faced in the marketplace and a falling share price, Ed McCracken was fired and SGI brought in Richard Belluzzo to replace him.

On May 8, 2006, SGI announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for itself and U.S. subsidiaries as part of a plan to reduce debt by $250 million.

[17] In December 2008, SGI received a delisting notification from NASDAQ, as its market value had been below the minimum $35 million requirement for 10 consecutive trading days, and also did not meet NASDAQ's alternative requirements of a minimum stockholders' equity of $2.5 million or annual net income from continuing operations of $500,000 or more.

[19] The sale, ultimately for $42.5 million, was finalized on May 11, 2009; at the same time, Rackable announced their adoption of "Silicon Graphics International" as their global name and brand.

[22][23][needs update] After the Rackable acquisition, Vizworld magazine published a series of six articles that chronicle the downfall of SGI.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquired Silicon Graphics International in November 2016, which allowed HPE to place the SGI Pleiades, a TOP500 supercomputer at NASA Ames Research Center, in its portfolio.

[28][29] In 2010, GPHI announced it had won a significant favorable ruling in its litigation with ATI Technologies and AMD in June 2010,[30][31] following the patent lawsuit originally filed during the Silicon Graphics, Inc.

[38][39][40] SGI's first generation products, starting with the IRIS (Integrated Raster Imaging System) 1000 series of high-performance graphics terminals, were based on the Motorola 68000 family of microprocessors.

SGI rapidly developed its machines into workstations with its second product line — the IRIS 2000 series, first released in August 1985.

The 2500 and 2500T had a larger chassis, a standard 6' 19" EIA rack with space at the bottom for two SMD disk drives weighing approximately 68 kg each.

[45] The non-Turbo models used the Multibus for the CPU to communicate with the floating point accelerator, while the Turbos added a ribbon cable dedicated for this.

These included the massive Onyx visualization systems, the size of refrigerators and capable of supporting up to 64 processors while managing up to three streams of high resolution, fully realized 3D graphics.

[53] In the late 1990s, when much of the industry expected the Itanium to replace both CISC and RISC architectures in non-embedded computers, SGI announced their intent to phase out MIPS in their systems.

[55][56][57][58][59] For over 20 years – until the introduction of the Vulkan API[60][61][62][63] – OpenGL remained the only real-time 3D graphics standard to be portable across a variety of operating systems.

[68][69] The group produced the Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) specification,[68] but began to unravel little more than a year after its formation.

[70][71] For eight consecutive years (1995–2002), all films nominated for an Academy Award for Distinguished Achievement in Visual Effects were created on Silicon Graphics computer systems.

[75] The 1995 film Congo also features an SGI laptop computer being used by Dr. Ross (Laura Linney) to communicate via satellite to TraviCom HQ.

SGI was a promoter of free software,[citation needed] supporting several projects such as Linux and Samba, and opening some of its own previously proprietary code such as the XFS filesystem and the Open64 compiler.

[81] In 1995, SGI purchased Alias Research, Kroyer Films, and Wavefront Technologies in a deal totaling approximately $500 million and merged the companies into Alias|Wavefront.

In 1998, SGI announced that future generations of its machines would be based not on their own MIPS processors, but the upcoming "super-chip" from Intel, code-named "Merced" and later called Itanium.

MIPS Technologies would focus entirely on the embedded market, where it was having some success, and SGI would no longer have to fund development of a CPU that, since the failure of ARC, found use only in their own machines.

[96] An Altix ICE 8200 installed at New Mexico Computing Applications Center (with 14336 processors) ranked at number 3 on the TOP500 list of November 2007.

In fact, SGI's largest revenue has always been generated by government and defense applications, energy, and scientific and technical computing.

In an SN system, processors, memory, and a bus- and memory-controller are coupled together into an entity called a node, usually on a single circuit board.

This allows the combined memory of all the nodes to be accessed under a single OS image using standard shared-memory synchronization methods.

[99] In October 2004, SGI built the supercomputer Columbia, which broke the world record for computer speed, for the NASA Ames Research Center.