Once again, the computer graphics (CG) community joined together at SIGGRAPH, the world's biggest CG show. The event took place last week, August 8-12, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. This year marks the 30th anniversary of SIGGRAPH (the organization, not the show), and many special activities reminded attendants of the relevance of computer graphics throughout the last three decades.

As in past years, SIGGRAPH was divided into the classic three areas: the courses and panels, where world-class scientists and engineers discussed hot new topics; the main exhibition floor where companies showcase their new products and technologies; and the special activities, ranging from art galleries to movie passes and parties.

In my wrap up of the show, l'll focus on the exhibition floor, as it's the place where all companies pile up to show the world their new products. This year the expo occupied 160,000 square feet with 350 booths. According to event management, about 50,000 people came from 75 different countries. The hall was quite spectacular: huge screens showing movie FX, fridge-sized speakers pumping out dance music - and really good-looking dancers performing real-time motion capture demos (although SIGGRAPH is still far from matching E3). Another funny thing to point out is that SIGGRAPH seems to have its own fashion standard: the worse you are at matching dress colors, the more important you are. Yellow shirt on green shorts? Maybe a vice-president. Yellow shirt on green shorts and pink sunglasses? Probably president.

The SGI Affair

I'll start with one of the big announcements that shocked everyone at SIGGRAPH. Silicon Graphics is about to embark upon a major restructuring involving most products and divisions. First of all, the company wants to become more efficient and competitive. Nothing new here, yet. What's new is that SGI is becoming more and more interested in the Linux scene, and in fact is planning to incorporate Linux as the main OS across its product range. Interesting, especially considering SGI already has a proprietary OS (IRIX) which, according to some SGI engineers at SIGGRAPH, will eventually disappear.

On the hardware side, SGI plans to begin using Intel chips (starting with the soon-to-ship Intel Merced) as the main CPU throughout all its products. This includes the low-end Visual Workstation systems (some of which already use Intel hardware), but will eventually reach higher configurations (and prices), such as the Origin supercomputers.

Additionally, SGI said it will also stop developing new graphics chipsets, and will start using Nvidia's hardware. So, what do we have if we put all this together, add some water, and shake well? We get SGI workstations built with mainstream parts, blended together using SGI's unique knowledge of graphics architectures to get the best price/performance ratio. As some engineers pointed out, SGI's current strategy can't be sustained much longer, as some companies (namely, Nvidia) are producing chipsets which rival SGI's own. Besides, a consumer-oriented company like Nvidia works with yearly (or 6-month) product-cycles, a speed that cannot be matched by a larger, more structured company like SGI.

What do I want to see? I'd really like a high-end SGI machine built with Merceds, Nvidia chips, and Linux as the OS. The question is whether SGI will be able to keep the price-performance ratio competitive with other vendors. Recent reviews of the Visual Workstations (models 320 and 540) report good performance, but complain that the machines are still a bit overpriced. Price cutting is the way to go.

Regarding the SGI/Nvidia relationship, SGI will be sending to Nvidia a group of very talented engineers to create a team that defines future chips' architectures. The team will thus have SGI's historical knowledge of graphics applications, and Nvidia's current market leadership. This move just seems to confirm what's obvious: SGI wants to abandon the chip creation business and is transferring technology to nVidia, a company that's already staffed by quite a few ex-SGI engineers.

Besides this big news, SGI showed off OpenGL Optimizer (the technology which was to be used as their gift to the Fahrenheit project, but more on that later), I saw those great-looking flat screens for visual workstations, and more SGI systems running Linux than you can shake a light sabre at.