With markets drying up and R&D budgets taking a pounding, both Silicon Graphics and Nvidia are facing some tough times. Nvidia are being squeezed in the chipset arena by both Intel and AMD/ATI, and their graphics biz is taking a hit from AMD/ATI and also their recent production issues.

With a number of staff leaving SGI to work at Nvidia, Quadro’s presence in SGI’s visualisation systems, and Nvidia looking more and more to move into high end visualisation, how long will it be before the two companies get together?

A partnership – or even a full merger – would benefit both companies enormously, and allow them to merge R&D spend and come up with some really innovative solutions for high end visualisation problems. CUDA and discrete GPUs as processing units seems to play into SGI’s strategy for mix-and-match processing (see their use of FPGAs in Altix) and with Altix ICE taking off even more, such modular solutions could provide a compelling solution for many different vertical markets.

Will it happen? I think it should, and I forecast that we’ll see some movement in this direction in the coming year, as the economy gets worse.

The press releases are out, and Silicon Graphics has now officially launched it’s Vue suite. And very interesting it all looks too. It reminds me a lot of VRML on steroids, and I’m looking forward to getting some more details on how the visualisation copes with bandwidth limits as well as varying display resolutions on the remote devices.

Here’s the video from SGI introducing Vue and it’s associated technologies:

Check out some of the images of Vue in action:

Visual data mashups – in this case, command and control activities. SGI say:

Silicon Graphics FusionVUE™ – FusionVUE™ dynamically integrates any kind of information in any combination from any source and presents information via an intuitive, contextual and 3-dimensional VUEspace™ environment.

Or global collaboration. This example shows:

Silicon Graphics VUE™ – Product design teams collaborate across the globe for everything from daily interaction to company-wide design reviews. Colleagues around the globe can view and interact with 3D product models, simulations and product plans, while videoconferencing within the same 3D viewing environment.

On a related note, it’s nice to see the return of the Cube and the old Silicon Graphicslogos on the main press release. Head over there for some more pictures and details of the Vue suite.