[wodenokoto]

The success criteria is not mentioned at all, so there is no clear way of settling this.

yes the brand "risc" failed, but does that mean the idea behind risc presented by the computer science community failed?

I'm no processor expert, but it sounds like to me the paradigm behind risc is both theoretical and practically sound and is a key component in most modern CPU's.

[qznc]

I would disagree. Intel adds more and more special instructions for niche uses (crypto,HPC,virtualization,etc) for the sake of efficiency. This becomes increasingly necessary for performance improvements, because frequency scaling hit its boundary for now and manycore is about to (see Dark Silicon).