Re: effectively compete with Wintel machines.
> I think it was more that the performance of Wintel machines caught up with SGI's offerings and they couldn't compete on price.
The great advantage that SGI and HP Unix workstations had was a large flat virtual memory space, same was true for DEC and Sun, but they didn't invest in highend graphics subsystems. When the Alpha team joined AMD and produced the AMD64 (x86_64) architecture the advantage of the Unix boys vanished overnight and pulled the plug out of SGI's business.