In a press release on 6 September 2006, SGI announced the end of the MIPS/IRIX line. Production will end on 29 December 2006 and the last orders will be fulfilled by March 2007. Support for these products will end no sooner than December 2013. All remaining SGI products run Linux.




IRIX is compliant with UNIX System V Release 4, UNIX 95 and POSIX (including 1e/2c draft 15 ACLs and Capabilities).

IRIX has particularly strong support for 3D graphics, video, and high-bandwidth bulk data transfer. IRIX was one of the first Unix flavors to feature a graphical user interface for the main desktop environment, and is widely used in the computer animation industry and for scientific visualization due to its extremely good performance with 3D graphics. IRIX uses the IRIX Interactive Desktop, which by default uses the 4dwm X window manager with a custom look designed using the Motif widget toolkit.