[jcadam]

After the Mactel announcement, I did some looking around on traditional RISC workstation manufacturers. I was surprised to see Sun and SGI moving away from their own RISC designs to AMD Opteron (in the case of Sun) and Intel Itanium (in the case of SGI). Even IBM is featuring Opetron workstations listed before their own POWER-based boxes.

Although I had been keeping up on the news, I never before really took notice of how many RISC processor families were falling by the wayside in the wake of intel/AMDs dumping of obscene $$ and manpower into x86. Alpha is dead. MIPS is nearly dead. SPARC is dying. PPC on the desktop just had its throat slit.

So, looks like we're down to x86 (currently transitioning to x86-64) ALONE in the consumer space. Workstation class systems will soon be a mix of x86-64 and itanium. While POWER will continue to hang on in the server arena for a while longer. The really funky architectures in the supercomputer space will soon be gone with the ever more-popular clusters of cheaper CPUs.

How long before POWER dies and RISC dies with it? Of course, maybe EPIC is the future and when CISC finally dies its long overdue death, we'll be switching to IA64 (itanium) with the rest of the industry. Then we'll be down to ONE ISA. This has its advantages and disadvantages, but is probably a sign that 'computing' is near the end of its adolescence and transitioning into adulthood.

[ghporter]

If the promised benefits of RISC architecture would have actually been realized, I don't think the processors would be fading away. Early and substantial inroads into the processor market showed that RISC is viable and worthwhile. Unfortunately, in order for RISC to maintain momentum, chip manufacturers have to stay behind it and continue development.

And this is indeed a catch. For example, IBM did not put enough emphasis on progress to improve the performance-particularly the power consumption issue-of the PowerPC processor, while Intel, having always taken abuse for how much power their chips consume, has been working 24/7 to address that very issue. At the same time, they've reduced the "process" dimension, reduced the overall die size, and INCREASED the number of transistors on their mainline chips, Their internal architecture has been tweaked to improve performance as well; their current chips outperform their earlier chips even when run at the same, lower speeds of the older chips.

One thing to think about in the discussion of Intel processors; they are not entirely "CISC." On a very low level, they are closer to RISC processors, but internally they run "microcode" which tells the core processor how to interpret the CISC instructions, making them very flexible. Don't bash this architecture too much; it's outlasted several other concepts and doesn't look like it's going to go away any time soon.