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by acdha
815 days ago
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One thing to remember is that chips are complex and defy simple binary classification. Even Intel thought that CISC was on the way out, although they were going down a somewhat extreme path with EPIC, but the most successful approach turned out to be a hybrid where complex CISC instructions were broken into RISC-like micro-ops. That got Intel back in the game with the Pentium Pro getting close enough to the DEC Alpha’s performance lead and with the advantage of not having to recompile everything in an era where that was orders of magnitude harder than it is now. I wouldn’t say either side won since that has been going back and forth for decades now. It’s also hard to separate that from other factors: was the Pentium more successful than the PowerPC because of CISC or because Intel had much better fabs than Motorola? If Motorola, IBM, DEC, or HP had had less incompetent management at the time it’s possible that we might remember this period very differently. |
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Note that neither are these micro-ops RISC (they are long, complex and specific to the chip, actually much closer to EPIC), nor was this micro-ops approach new.
Intel tried to use the 64 bit transition to finally abandon x86.
It almost managed to do this, but AMD saw a chance and AMD64 happened, ironically leveraging the x86 software moat against Intel. Software would not migrate to Itanium, but smoothly transition to AMD64.
Without the moat, Itanium was doomed. But it was doomed either way, as was found later, due to its complexity. Complicating compilers, having learned nothing from the RISC paper.