A minor bit of the story that postdates this 1997 article: in the late '90s, SGI's strategy to recapture the high-end workstation market was to hitch their hors

A minor bit of the story that postdates this 1997 article: in the late '90s, SGI's strategy to recapture the high-end workstation market was to hitch their horse to Intel's new Itanium architecture, which they thought would allow them to position their boxes as a cut above the performance of commodity x86 workstations. That strategy may or may not have worked if the Itanium actually had x86-beating performance, but since Intel never delivered a performant Itanium it definitely didn't work.