Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just HPC -- they made more money on enterprise servers than on their few sunfire systems and Cray SPARC systems. x86 and NT (and later Linux, but initially NT) killed them on the Workstation market, and Linux/x86 killed them on the server. Then Oracle engaged in serious abuse of a dead body, which gives us Java today.
Actually SGI were more or less destroyed by Linux too. I remember being in a meeting with them at the height of the dot com boom where we were told that they were embracing Linux for mid-range to replace lower-end IRIX systems. My colleagues and I came out of the meeting unable to understand why people would opt for x86 SGI hardware running Linux to run web servers at two to three times the cost of equivalent off the…
SGI had a lot of problems. I mean they even started selling Windows NT workstations at one point.