Silicon Graphics
Latest
Apple, Samsung, HTC and Sony sued over graphics rendering patents
Sometimes, you have to go all-in. Why not sue all the leading smartphone makers at once? That's what Graphics Properties Holdings is doing, channeling the ghost (and intellectual back-catalogue) of Silicon Graphics. Filing six cases against Apple, Samsung, RIM, HTC, Sony and LG, the lawsuits reference floating point calculations for rendering graphics, something that the company received patent approval for only yesterday. GPH claims that several phones, including the iPhone, Galaxy S II and BlackBerry Torch, infringe on its intellectual property. Layman legal types can sniff around the patent in question at the source below.
Apple, Sony, others sued by Graphics Properties
Apple and a few other big electronics companies are facing yet another lawsuit, this time from a company called Graphics Properties, formerly known as Silicon Graphics. These patents target a process that turns text and images into pixels for display on mobile screens, and Silicon Graphics is claiming that Apple, Sony, HTC, LG, and Samsung are all infringing on its patent rights. The company already filed for bankruptcy a couple of years ago, but its filings with the court say that unless these companies stop selling devices using technology it claims to have developers, it will "suffer irreparable harm." Obviously, neither Apple or any of the other companies had a comment to share, as they all prefer to let this play out in court. But we're guessing if Apple did have a comment, it would be something along the lines of, "Not this nonsense again."
SGI name lives on after $42.5 million sale to Rackable Systems
As you know, Rackable Systems was originally hoping to acquire the one-time king of the 3D set for $25 million (with some speculating that even that was a bit much), but it looks like the bankruptcy judges had other plans. Now that the dust has settled (and a check has been cut for almost twice the original asking price) it looks like the two companies will finally merge, forming an outfit called... SGI. The newly minted Silicon Graphics International hopes to combine the strong server business of Rackable with the original Silicon Graphics Inc. name (and overseas service contracts), inspiring the same sort of technological alchemy that once brought the iconic brand to the silver screen by way of such fine cinematic fare as First Kid. In addition, SGI plans continued development and support for the existing Silicon Graphics and Rackable product lines. Quite frankly, we really don't care what they do, as long as they bring back the Indigo -- back in the day we would have killed for one of those bad boys.
SGI to sell itself for just $25m, throw huge sadness party
Man, the difference a few years decades makes. In the 90s, Silicon Graphics helped create silver screen mega-hits like Jurassic Park and Terminator 2, and in 1997, its fiscal year sales totaled $3.66 billion. Today, the company's mired in its second bankruptcy, which has occurred just three years after the first. In order to just terminate the dream before it gets any more nightmarish, SGI has announced plans to sell itself to Fremont-based Rackable Systems for a mere $25 million -- and some analysts are even concerned that the suitor here could be sinking its teeth into a sour deal. The agreement still has to be approved by a bankruptcy judge, and of course, there's still a few more inches of red tape to cut through, but we'll be sure to let you know when the fantasy ends and the wake begins.
SGI suing ATI for...well, you know the rest
Oh how the mighty have fallen: fresh off its emergence from Chapter 11, once-proud hardware manufacturer SGI (a.k.a. Silicon Graphics) chose to celebrate the occasion not with a product announcement or by gifting its employees with bunch of iPods, but by dropping one of the ol' patent infringement lawsuits on recent AMD acquisition ATI. According to the suit, ATI has been violating a 2003 patent covering a "display system having floating point rasterization and floating point frame buffering," which in layman's terms describes a method for "software to operate directly on data in a frame buffer" -- apparently "an important resource in achieving [the] enhanced graphics processing demanded by today's computer systems." Now we're not knocking SGI for defending its intellectual property -- after all, other rival manufacturers have seemingly validated its claim by licensing the patent in question -- but is getting your litigation on really the best way to show the world that your company is back on the field and ready to innovate? The answer seems to be yes, at least according to CEO Dennis McKenna, who is promising that this legal maneuver is just the first of many designed to "aggressively protect and enforce [SGI's] IP." Fair enough, but please make sure that your engineers are doing their R&D thing while legal does its, um, legal thing, or else SGI may go down in history next to another sullied three-letter acronym: NTP.[Via Slashdot]
Silicon Graphics files for Chapter 11
We can't help but feel a twinge of melancholy as we ponder Silicon Graphics' announcement today that the company is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. However, the SGI of today is a mere shadow of it former self, with a mixed bag of products that range from overpriced, Linux-based, Intel-powered workstations to overpriced, Linux-based, Intel-powered supercomputers. But it wasn't all that long ago that the SGI Indy was considered the hottest thing on the market, and seemed to herald the future of multimedia computing. Of course, that future was pre-empted first by cheaper Unix and Linux options, and later by Mac OSX and even Windows, which was hardly a factor in the graphics industry back in the early 90s when the Indy debuted. So, best of luck emerging from bankruptcy, SGI. We'd like to see you stick around for a bit just for old time's sake. But if we want one of your boxes, we'll skip the new ones, and hunt down an Indy on eBay.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in.]
