Editing Silicon Graphics (section)

===Switch to Itanium===
In 1998, SGI announced that future generations of its machines would be based not on their own MIPS processors, but the upcoming "super-chip" from [[Intel]], code-named "Merced" and later called [[Itanium]]. Funding for its own high-end processors was reduced, and it was planned that the [[R10000]] would be the last MIPS mainstream processor. [[MIPS Technologies]] would focus entirely on the embedded market, where it was having some success, and SGI would no longer have to fund development of a CPU that, since the failure of [[Advanced RISC Computing|ARC]], found use only in their own machines. This plan quickly went awry. As early as 1999, it was clear the Itanium was going to be delivered very late and would have nowhere near the performance originally expected. As the production delays increased, MIPS' existing R10000-based machines grew increasingly uncompetitive. It was eventually forced to introduce faster MIPS processors, the [[R10000#R12000|R12000]], [[R10000#R14000|R14000]] and [[R10000#R16000|R16000]], which were used in a series of models from 1999 through 2006.<ref>{{Cite web|date=1999-02-26|title=SGI Brings 300 MHz MIPS R12000 Processor to Octane Wkstn Line|url=https://www.hpcwire.com/1999/02/26/sgi-brings-300-mhz-mips-r12000-processor-octane-wkstn-line/|access-date=2020-08-02|website=HPCwire|language=en-US}}</ref>

SGI's first Itanium-based system was the short-lived SGI 750 workstation, launched in 2001. SGI's MIPS-based systems were not to be superseded until the launch of the [[Itanium 2]]-based [[SGI Altix|Altix]] servers and [[SGI Prism|Prism]] workstations some time later. Unlike the MIPS systems, which ran [[IRIX]], the Itanium systems used [[SuSE Linux|SuSE Linux Enterprise Server]] with SGI enhancements as their [[operating system]]. SGI used [[Transitive Corporation]]'s [[QuickTransit]] software to allow their old MIPS/IRIX applications to run (in emulation) on the new Itanium/Linux platform.

In the server market, the Itanium 2-based Altix eventually replaced the MIPS-based Origin product line. In the workstation market, the switch to Itanium was not completed before SGI exited the market.

The Altix was the most powerful computer in the world in 2006, assuming that a "computer" is defined as a collection of hardware running under a single instance of an operating system. The Altix had 512 Itanium processors running under a single instance of [[Linux]]. A cluster of 20 machines was then the eighth-fastest [[supercomputer]]. All faster supercomputers were clusters, but none have as many [[FLOPS]] per machine. However, more recent supercomputers are very large clusters of machines that are individually less capable. SGI acknowledged this and in 2007 moved away from the "massive [[Non-Uniform Memory Access|NUMA]]" model to clusters.