| You asked for a citation about why almost all RISC chips from the 80s and 90s failed. Well, here it is: - ARM (ARM) - ARM has done very well. It traditionally focused on low power chips. Over the past two decades, ARM has created faster and faster chips. Its chips can now be used in laptop, desktop, and server systems. I would argue ARM is a success. I would also argue it's not clear that ARM systems are faster than Intel or AMD systems. - Alpha (Digital Equipment / Compaq / Hewlett Packard) - Alpha is dead. No one makes or sells Alpha computers any more. - MIPS / Silicon Graphics - Silicon Graphics is gone. MIPS may survive as an embedded chip. MIPS chips are not used in used in main stream servers nor do they out preform x86 chips from AMD or Intel. - PA RISC (Hewlett Packard) - HP dropped this in favor of Intel's Itanium chips. - POWER (IBM) - This architecture is still being sold by IBM in real products. My guess is it is a good chip but it is still more expensive and slower than chips from AMD and Intel. Still, IBM deserves a lot of credit for keeping POWER going for over 30 years and for outlasting all of the other server/workstation RISC chips from the 1980s and early 1990s (ARM was not in servers or workstations during this time period). One sign that POWER is slower than Intel and AMD is there are no POWER chip benchmark results for the integer speed tests on the SPEC web site (https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/results/cint2017.html). This implies that IBM's cores are slower than x86 cores. - PowerPC (Motorola and IBM) - This may survive as an embedded chip. It is not used in servers or desktop/laptop computers. Apple was the only user and they switched to Intel in the 2000s (they also recently switched from Intel to their own custom ARM Mx chips). - SPARC (Sun Microsystems) - The microprocessor design team radically downsized sometime in the last decade (https://www.networkworld.com/article/964265/the-sun-sets-on-...). It still has support but my guess is the chips are not fast or cheap. The only reason you would use it is if you had software you could not move to x86 or ARM systems. We had 7 RISC chip architectures launch in 1980s and 1990s. 6 were used in workstations and servers. One (ARM) was primary used in low power systems in the 1990s. In 2024, 2 are still going (ARM and POWER), 1 is on life support (SPARC), 2 may be used in some embedded systems (MIPS and POWER PC), and 2 are dead (Alpha and PA RISC). ARM chips may be able to outperform x86 chips but I have seen very little evidence of this (Apple's M1, M2, and M3 may be better but it is hard to tell without reliable independent benchmarks). POWER is probably a good chip but it has failed to beat x86's performance. The rest are irrelevant in the laptop, desktop, and server world. My main point is RISC's proponents promised that RISC chips would be faster than CISC chips like the x86/x64 chips. In 2024, we have not seen any evidence that the fastest chip must be a RISC chip. In fact, we have seen the opposite where none of the RISC architecture's hold the undisputed performance crown. If RISC was better, at least one of the RISC chip designs would have defeated AMD/Intel by now. |
Yes.
>Alpha (Digital Equipment / Compaq / Hewlett Packard) - Alpha is dead. No one makes or sells Alpha computers any more.
Important to mention: Intel bought the Alpha IP, thus ensuring Alpha is no longer a problem to them.
>MIPS chips are not used in used in main stream servers nor do they out preform x86 chips from AMD or Intel.
Important to mention: MIPS abandoned MIPS ISA in favor of RISC-V, which doesn't hold the workstation/server performance crown... yet. Anytime now.
>POWER (IBM) - This architecture is still being sold by IBM in real products. My guess is it is a good chip but it is still more expensive and slower than chips from AMD and Intel.
Emphasis on expensive. They would be competitive, except price means they are not.
>SPARC
Register Window was a bad idea after all. Also, Oracle. Might as well be dead.
>We had 7 RISC chip architectures launch in 1980s and 1990s.
In the list, yes. There's more. But it is important to observe that's because the industry stopped launching CISC ones.
And from the CISC ones, only x86 remains.
>My main point is RISC's proponents promised that RISC chips would be faster than CISC chips
There is no such promise in RISC whitepaper. Citation needed as to where this promise is found (and who these RISC proponents are).
>If RISC was better, at least one of the RISC chip designs would have defeated AMD/Intel by now.
No, it does not follow. Furthermore, AMD and Intel can and have made RISC chips before, and will likely make RISC chips again.
A far better question is "has RISC succeeded?", and here the answer is yes. For decades, there have been no tabula rasa CISC ISAs, and among the remaining ones only x86 has some life to it.
Meanwhile, RISC ISAs drive smartphones, the computers that most people use the most, as well as Mac computers, the most prominent alternative to Windows computers in the market.