On the other side, turns out both Playstation (1) and Nintendo 64 did quite well for quite long.

PS2, as well. But games and game hardware tend to have very different CPU requirements than general purpose workstations.

The N64/PS1/PS2 (and others) weren’t exceptional for very long, if ever, in terms of CPU power. They relied on dedicated graphics hardware, low price, ease—of-use, a business model that allowed for selling the base hardware at a loss, and devs optimizing for a fixed platform to stay competitive for 5-10 years as PC hardware improved.

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fidotron 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I seem to recall the CPU in the N64 was specced to be something like 75% of the performance of a Pentium 90 but for 20% of the price. The PS1 doesn't even have floating point. When the PS2 was released it felt like x86 was advancing faster than ever, so whatever impressive performance edge it had lasted for about five minutes.

In all cases it's hard to argue that MIPS devices were sold on the strength of their CPUs from the mid 90s onwards.

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Keyframe 2 days ago | parent [-]

N64 was effectively Indy, but priced into a game console. Its devkit was an Indy (at first) even.

	▲	fidotron 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> N64 was effectively Indy Not really, no. The memory system and graphics systems are completely different, and the CPU is a different MIPS processor to one in any SGI desktop. Some devkits did involve having whole subsystems on expansions in Indys though. It should say something that when the Indy was announced the quip was "It's an Indigo without the go" so even had the N64 been Indy based it would not have been noted for CPU performance.