It began in the 1970s, with rumors rumbling from the outskirts of the American technology giant, IBM. A new chip architecture capable of revolutionary processing speeds. It was called RISC. The RISC Wars were fought over nearly 20 years, with the most intensive battles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At its peak, it involved a mix of young chip upstarts and old giants across the world throwing around benchmark results. Sun Microsystems. MIPS Computer. PA-RISC. IBM. PowerPC. DEC Alpha. Fujitsu and NEC in Japan. Siemens and Philips in Europe. And of course, looming over them all: Intel and the burgeoning Wintel Death Machine. It was a time of shifting alliances, leaps of inspiration, wild technical claims, and the Iron Fist of Intel. Today, we delve into legends of the RISC Wars.
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