The Ware for June 2026 is an SGI RM6-64 raster manager, from a KONA/InfiniteReality graphics system. Congrats to Christian for naming it! email me for your prize.
This gem of a board was gifted to me by someone at SGI back when I worked there in…I want to say 1998? I even still have the name plate from my cubicle, from back before the ‘bunnie’ nickname really stuck…
Back then, if you wanted to do graphics, SGI was the only game in town, but I joined the party late. Within six months of joining, most of the division I was in had jumped ship for these then little-known upstarts of nVidia and ATI. Lacking any connections and the office a ghost town (my office building was eventually acquired by another startup that’s become a household name, you might have heard of them: Google. Still really weird visiting friends that work on that campus…), I went back to the familiarity of MIT and got my PhD, and that was the last time I held a job in Silicon Valley. Ironically, my main project today is doing silicon, just not in the Valley. What’s that old saying…you can take the boy out of Silicon Valley, but you can’t take the silicon out of the boy?
It was pretty impressive what they could do at the board level at SGI. That all got eaten up by Moore’s Law and integrated graphics…and now that Moore’s Law has run out of steam, we’re returning with gusto to the huge rack servers with lots and lots of interconnect!
You and I both worked there at the same time. I loved SGI’s boards. Works of art, and I have a few myself still.
But I don’t agree they got eaten by Moore’s Law and integrated graphics. SGI designed the RCP in the N64, and there was Magic Carpet which got to tape out and was cancelled. What killed SGI was a series of absolutely brain dead decisions by management, including but not limited to: (1) cancelling MIPS (Beast and Alien) in favor of Itanium, (2) not enforcing clear violations of their patent pool, (3) being friends with Microsoft, because being friends with MS is way more dangerous than being it’s enemy, (4) pursuing a PC strategy too late and when they did, the VisualPC being their go-to (ugh), and above all, (5) taking a highly neurodivergent and very desirable workforce and treating it very badly. This wasn’t just Belluzio, it was also Basket and a handful of others. I won’t say the name of the exec I said this to, but about ten years ago I suggested writing a book on the failure of SGI. He said “nobody will talk yet. The wounds are still far too fresh to talk.”
Also the systems that kept (or rather didn’t) the dinosaurs in their cages at Jurassic Park.
Nice look back at the RM6-64 – always appreciate a good piece of SGI history, and the ghost-town office detail really paints the era. I’ve spent a few evenings reflowing old SGI boards myself, and there’s a certain charm to that level of per-board engineering that’s hard to find now. Speaking of careful design, I play SlimeKeyboardEscape when I need a break from soldering – it’s a quick keycap-dodging game that keeps my reflexes sharp. With Moore’s Law slowing, do you see a renewed push for specialized board-level interconnect, or will chiplet designs keep everything on-package for the next few years?