My apologies for my lack of clarity. . . (Score 1)

I did not mean to imply that the MIPS processor was the only proprietary processor out there. It clearly isn't. My complaint was more that SGI tried to do far too many things at once. It succeeded for quite awhile doing all these things. But keeping a processor architecture on the cutting edge is an inordinately difficult task. And SGI wasn't exactly forthcoming about the architecture (I don't remember the licensing fee for a MIPS core, but it was ungodly even then) so there were very few ports. And I'm sorry, but IRIX is a poor unix.

Now, I don't know what the ultimately best choice for SGI is or will be. They had an extremely strong server following for a long while and did quite well against Sun, IBM and HP. Additionally, their workstation business was also extremely successful, however the main niche there was its extreme graphics performance. That industry has now become over-populated and would have overtaken SGI's dominance in another generation or two. The decision to offload to nVidia was a wise one. So like I said, I don't know what they should do. I just know what they did, and that it failed.