SGI got lazy. It had the market for video and audio in its pocket. mostly because of what you said: I&#x2F;O bandwidth! even if the RISC cpu was garbage (despite what the uninformed article says), moving from PC to SGI was like adding a SSD to your machine! it was night and day when working with video.<p>Then microsoft come around and used its obnoxius tactics to take hold of firms such as Autodesk and others. which all dropped unix support to focus on windows. that was the nineties, when CGI quit being a small niche market to be the holywood standard, i.e. a very profitable niche market.<p>apple scrambled at the last minute and got some companies too. the most important at the time was shake or tremor (never remember what was the product and what was the company) and quickly reworked the products to only use quicktime video exclusively, which obviously killed it down the line. because quicktime was, is and always will be garbage. i think at that time they got what is now their video suit btw. but i&#x27;m not sure.<p>anyway, SGI ended up with no excuse for people to pay the premium price, not even on video editing. So everyone moved to PCs or macs. most of the custom software started to be written for linux (e.g. renderman) which SGI tried to corner by moving its server line to linux. but after itel and nvidia crushed them in performance &#x2F;watt and &#x2F;price, they just died for good.<p>tl;dr; there is nothing special about MIPS. i give that assembly for mips is much more comfortable than risc. but meh. you always have to code for the lower common denominator anyway.