"People are addicted to them," says Michael J. Zeitlin, an expert in computer visualization at Texaco Inc., which uses SGI workstations to penetrate seismic data.
SGI's sprawling Mountain View (Calif.) campus has become sort of a mecca. Celebrities such as artist Peter Max, director Milos Forman, and author Michael Crichton stop by to "grok" the latest technology. The offices look like a Soho gallery, what with exposed beams, winding steel staircases, and unusual art--mostly sculpture, as befits a 3-D company. This is the promised land--at least to its 4,200 employees and the 2,500 hopefuls who apply for jobs each month. The unofficial company motto: "Serious fun."
And serious money. When SGI reports fiscal year results on July 20, analysts expect a $141 million profit on a sales jump of at least 35%, to $1.5 billion--the third straight year of accelerating growth. Its 52% gross profit margin tops workstation rival Sun Microsystems Inc.'s 42% and is more than double the level of PC powerhouse Compaq Computer Corp. Even though it is largely confined to a 3-D niche, SGI passed IBM and Digital Equipment Corp. in 1993 to capture third place in the $10.5 billion workstation market, according to International Data Corp. And with its shares trading at around 23, SGI's $3.3 billion market value now tops those of DEC and Sun. Even President Clinton has noticed. When he and Vice-President Al Gore unveiled their technology policy in Silicon Valley last year, their only corporate stop was SGI.
But can SGI keep the magic going? In targeting everything from supercomputers to videogames, SGI may be taking on more than it can handle. What's more, few companies have managed to make a smooth transition from selling leading-edge technology to serving high-volume consumer markets. That will stretch SGI's management and marketing skills as never before.
But SGI seems to love a challenge. In all of computing, there are few tasks more complex than the creation of 3-D graphics. Until SGI, most workstations could create only crude 3-D "wireframe" images that resembled skeletons. The microprocessors, or silicon brains, in the workstations didn't have the power to draw complex graphics. No wonder. To create 3-D solids on a computer, you have to position thousands of different-shaped figures side by side, like pieces of a puzzle. Then, the figures must be converted into visible images by assembling tens of thousands of picture elements, or pixels--the myriad dots of light on the screen. Finally, to make the images move fluidly, they must be redrawn 30 times a second.
Two key innovations, based on the ideas of founder James H. Clark, make SGI's graphics fly. While an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University from 1979 to 1982, he and six students came up with novel ways for building a cheap graphics computer. The result is the Geometry Engine, a collection of custom chips for speeding up model creation, and the Graphics Library, a set of 120 software rules that help developers create programs that turn models into realistic 3-D images.
By taking the graphics burden off the machine's central microprocessor, the Geometry Engine vastly speeds up the creation of 3-D models. The microprocessor can then concentrate on turning those models into images on the screen. Other computer makers, such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sun, also have add-on graphics circuits, but customers say their speed and realism trails that of SGI. Says Carl Rosendahl, president of video production studio Pacific Data Images: "The others give interactive 3-D graphics a lot of lip service, but they haven't caught up."
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