Silicon Graphics Inc is reportedly on the verge of selling Cray Research to a technology acquisition company, Gores Technology Group. According to Reuters, the companies have been in talks for at least two months. SGI started to look for a buyer for its supercomputer unit back in August.
Steve Conway, a spokesperson for Cray, would not comment on reports that Los Angeles-based Gores was ready to snap up the unit. However, he did confirm that SGI was talking to one company about the acquisition and that an announcement was weeks rather than months away. A spokesperson for Gores also declined to comment on any possible takeover.
SGI decided to shed the Cray unit as part of plan to focus on its core businesses. Conway says that the unit has undergone a substantial internal reorganization, outsourcing its manufacturing requirements and cutting jobs, and is now profitable. He expects that the company will continue in a similar vein, whoever the eventual buyer maybe. At the recent SC 99 show, Cray talked up its T3E supercomputer – which can perform over 1 trillion operations per second, and that its successor would perform calculations more than an order of magnitude faster.
