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That first quote is funny when you look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#Timelin...

> Intel Pentium Pro 541 MIPS at 200 MHz ... 1996

Also this list of benchmarks suggests a SPARCstation5 was either slower or roughtly the same performance as the 1st-generation Pentiums (which came out in '93, only a year after that post): http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?11079...

But this was definitely a time when betting on RISC-based desktops seemed like a good idea.

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Low-end Sun hardware wasn't exactly fast. When the Pentium came out the gap between RISC workstations and commodity Intel desktops really started to shrink

Even better is that x86 started translating its instruction set into an internal RISC-like set, so RISC kind of won anyway.

RISC didn't "kind of" win; it really won, due to everybody walking around with tiny RISC computers in their pockets. Running a variety of linux.

Even the tiny windows computers are RISC machines. Windows NT also dates back to somewhere around 92 and made hardware independence a big deal. Dave Cutler had to fight tooth and nail to keep it in while lots if people were telling him to just build it for Intel.

The important difference between traditional RISC and what we have now in either x86 or ARM is the instruction encoding. You have to have a compact instruction encoding or you waste memory bandwidth. That's part of why x86 eventually beat the old RISC designs and that why ARM has the Thumb encodings.

I don't think it's that clear of a victory; ARM is everywhere (and so is MIPS, to a lesser extent) and is commonly mentioned, that much is true, but there are far more ISAs that most people don't hear about in mundane embedded applications (of which there are many) - 8051, 6502, PIC, etc. which are definitely CISCs.

Also the x86 being "RISC-like" internally is a bit of a misnomer - x86 uops are much wider (118 bits for the P6, even wider for later models) than most RISCs' fixed 32-bit instructions. Modern RISCs like the ARM Cortex series also decode instructions into wider uops.

> 6502 … which are definitely CISCs

It seems the "6502 risc or cisc" debate was never really solved, as a Google search for that phrase will show.

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