MIPS R3000
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
But the big reason is that except for the case of simple, short pipeline designs like the early MIPS parts they make designing CPUs annoying too.
The second you introduced parallel decode or a branch predictor with more than a cycle of latency these things hurt and don't help.
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Hundreds of thousands -- maybe millions? -- of MIPS-derived chips are still made every day.
I've been trying to not take this thing to ewaste for a decade
68060 released earlier than the pentium, and regardless it had about twice the performance per clock. But then Motorola decided to abandon 68k to focus on PowerPC.
Going further back: What if IBM picked 68000 over the 8086 for the PC?
I'm hoping RISC-V will put an end to x86. It's about time.
Well, then we would all be doing our computing on Amigas, or at least on Atari Falcons. People blame C= for the downfall of the Amiga, but Motorola abandoning the 68k line was a much bigger factor, with no immediate way forward being evident at the time.
>but Motorola abandoning the 68k line was a much bigger factor
The engineers had plans going forward. C= just didn't allow it to happen. They scrapped everything.
"This is too expensive."
As if releasing what would have been the absolute best microcomputer for several years (as per what actually happened, that is, assuming the competition didn't pull a miracle after seeing it) would have no value. As if economies of scale weren't a thing. As if making it cheaper later wasn't an option.
Morons.
For detail on the insanity, refer to The Insider Story[0] book.
[0] https://blog.amigaguru.com/book-review-commodore-the-inside-...
It's amazing; Too bad it's not open source.
There's some open source 68000 implementations, but they're all still slow. The most well-known is perhaps tg68k, used in MiSTer cores and in FPGA Arcade.
Not only is this wishful thinking and ignores the success so far of ARM, it doesn't make much sense any more - x86 is already "dead", almost all modern PCs will run amd64, with x86 as a kind of short-instruction emulation mode.
If RISC-V gets its Bitmanip extension, it might even deserve to displace ARM and x86.
But I might be biased.
Still, the barrel shifter on the ARM register bank output was inspired. For its time.
As for the bitmanip extension, it is well underway; the latest risc-v workshop had a presentation on it.
The keys, in my opinion, are the vector extension and the DSP extension. They do seem to still be 1-2 year away.
Other than that, there's some work on making interrupt and context switch latency lower. This is important for RTOSs and even more in general for microkernel multiserver operating systems such as Fuchsia which will matter a lot starting in the near future.
No one would wonder at x86 passing, it would have seemed totally obvious and overdue. Pentium surviving was astonishing. Still is. Probably another crime to lay at Microsoft's door.