| >ARM success 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. |