Thank you! It encourages me that someone got to see and appreciate it.
What is hard to convey to people outside the 3D hardware space is that the chief problem once you have the 3d pipeline down is really a market-development problem.
How do you sell an ever increasing amount of coprocessor compute?
Because the moment you hit the inevitable S-curve flattening out of your 3D value proposition, your coprocessor gets integrated into the (Intel) CPU die, just like the intel 387sx/dx floating point unit or earlier generations of IO coprocessors. Hence a frantic strategic push always into raytracing, HPC, AI, etc.
In hindsight it looks visionary, but the paranoia is at least as much a driving factor.
It’s now, for now, incredibly lucrative and the mastery of hardware parallelism may last as a moat for Nvidia, but I can sympathize at SGI not wanting to squeeze themselves back into a coprocessor-only business model. It’s a scary prospect. We can see only with hindsight it could have worked. Both business and technical leadership had such huge success diversifying their graphics hardware expertise into full system skills that they couldn’t refocus. They would have had to die in order to live again. Or perhaps slightly less exaggerated, to survive they would have to forsake/kill off a huge part of what they had become.
