Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics built the first practical hardware-accelerated 3D graphics systems. Its Geometry Engine — designed at Stanford under ARPA — delivered ~6 million geometry operations per second. It pioneered scalable cc-NUMA architectures in the mid-1990s. But its reliance on proprietary MIPS and failed transitions to Itanium and Xeon eroded its position as PC graphics commoditised. It filed for bankruptcy in 2009.