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To: wanna_bmw who wrote (152984)	12/21/2001 1:27:31 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 186894

"For a long time, it was speculated that x86 architecture would eventually be over-run by RISC architectures" Sure it was. RISC was supposed to be cheaper to design than CISC, something I was dubious about at the time. The early RISC processors didn't have a lot of the stuff that it turned out they would actually need, like floating point, byte addressing, memory management, caches and divide instructions. When the necessary stuff was added, they started to gain significant complexity, and increased the design effort. And DEC did promote that Alphas would extend all the way down to the palmtop. And when that became obvious it would never happen, they designed the StrongArm... But MIPS, Alpha, Power or Sparc weren't really designed with the desktop in mind. PowerPC was derived from Power with that in mind, but they wouldn't have derived it if they thought Power was for the desktop. Yes, there was the ACE consortium with a MIPS derivative for that use, but to say that MIPS was targeting x86 is a bit of a stretch, it derived from work that was done at a university (Stanford?). And Sparc was designed to supplant 68k processors in their workstations. Alpha was designed as a Vax follow on, but they were ambitious for it's use, as I noted. But DEC was a lot more interested in higher end stuff than the x86s of that day were being used for. It wasn't until the Pentium Pro was released that x86 could come anywhere close to playing in the space that DEC was interested in. You realize that your statement "I meant that the diverging performance of x86 and RISC in the 80's and early 90's allowed several designs to take root in the enterprise markets, a market that wasn't very popular for an x86 chip until the last decade." is an understatement of epic proportions, don't you? Enterprise markets were the domain of minicomputers (Vaxen, DG Eclipse, IBM System whatevers) and mainframes. It wasn't until the late '80s that x86 came anywhere close to even a Vax 750, which was an early '80s machine.