Seeks Chapter 11 shield
Belluzzo's Nvidia pact 'sealed SGI's fate'
Historical - but tasty
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Saturday 13th May 2006 09:32 GMT

Letters Shortly before SGI chief Rick Belluzzo joined Microsoft, he made three fateful decisions that appear to have sealed the great company's fate. We discussed these here this week.

Now a former staffer who lived through the brief Belluzzo era has this to add to the intrigue. It's news to us, and the implications are ... well, read on. "Around the same time as the NVidia deal was sealed," he writes, "SGI canned the internal high end graphics team, decimating the group - and it was more like 1 in 10 survived, if that. But SGI also told the low end graphics team that NVidia would be paying their salaries while they finished their death march, and afterwards they would be NVIDIA employees

"That was part of the NVIDIA settlement - along with the cross licensing of IP. It effectively meant that SGI was exiting any meaningful graphics hardware development, for the first time."

We'd be particularly interested to hear from SGI staff in the legal and financial departments at the time.