RISC is better if you have finite money and want to build a chip.
The simple reality is that Intel had the Wintel monopoly and they had gigantic volume and absurd amounts of money to invest. If you compare the size of teams working on SPARC to what Intel invested its totally clear why they ended up winning.
> The idea that RISC was somehow elegant turned out to be a myth.
No, it didn't. The reality is a bunch of literal students made a processor that outperformed industry cores. Imagine today if a university said 'we made a chip that is faster then i9'.
The early RISC processors with pretty small amount of work very incredibly competitive.
So yes, its was actually amazing and revolutionary and totally changed computing forever.
That this advantage would magically mean 'RISC will be the best thing ever for the rest of history' is pretty crazy demand to make for it to be called revolution.
> code compression properties of CISC continued to benefit x86.
Not actually that much, code density of x86 for 64 bit systems isn't all that amazing. Its certainty not why they won.
The moment at which it seemed like the RISC people were really on to something important was the moment when the size and complexity of the x86 frontend was really quite large compared to the rest of the core. Now you can't even find the x86 decoder on a die shot, because it's irrelevant. The 512x512b FMA unit is like the size of Alaska and the decoder is the size of Monaco. So the advantages of RISC were overtaken by semiconductor physics for the most part.
>The 512x512b FMA unit is like the size of Alaska and the decoder is the size of Monaco. So the advantages of RISC were overtaken by semiconductor physics for the most part.
There still is a hardware advantage (has nothing to do with sizes, everything to do with complexity), but let's ignore that.
RISC being simpler doesn't just help the hardware. It also helps the software, the whole stack.
Extra complexity needs strong justification. RISC-V takes that idea seriously, and this is why it already has the traction it does, and is going through exponential growth.
RISC-V has many nice properties but it didn't exist 25 years ago so what does it have to do with why those companies and their objectively inferior CPUs disappeared?
It seems to be more about skill and budget of the development teams, and those are both getting bigger. I think a major underlying factor is the massive increase of transistor budgets relative to clock speed and latency to memory. That pulls every architecture down the path of big caches, speculation, specialized functional units, multiprocessors, etc, that add complexity dwarfing anything in the front end. If I was starting fresh the labor to do x86 would be a handicap but on the other hand Intel switching to RISC-V or whatever wouldn't do anything for them.
Again, if you give 2 teams 50M to develop a new processor. One using x86 and the other using RISC-V I have not question in my mind what team would come out ahead.
That is exactly the ivory tower attitude that torpedoed all of the RISC workstation companies. Nobody, literally not one single customer cares how easy or hard it was to design and implement the CPU. They only care how much it costs and how fast it goes.
Its the opposite of ivory tower, its simple analysis of complexity.
To make the argument that CISC had anything to do with anything would be, what if in mid-95s Sun, SGI would have released their own CISC ISA. That would have been literally crazy.
> Nobody, literally not one single customer cares how easy or hard it was to design and implement the CPU
The companies who produce them care.
> They only care how much it costs and how fast it goes.
Yes and I explained why x86 won based on that logic so I don't know what you arguing.
The simple reality is that Intel had the Wintel monopoly and they had gigantic volume and absurd amounts of money to invest. If you compare the size of teams working on SPARC to what Intel invested its totally clear why they ended up winning.
> The idea that RISC was somehow elegant turned out to be a myth.
No, it didn't. The reality is a bunch of literal students made a processor that outperformed industry cores. Imagine today if a university said 'we made a chip that is faster then i9'.
The early RISC processors with pretty small amount of work very incredibly competitive.
So yes, its was actually amazing and revolutionary and totally changed computing forever.
That this advantage would magically mean 'RISC will be the best thing ever for the rest of history' is pretty crazy demand to make for it to be called revolution.
> code compression properties of CISC continued to benefit x86.
Not actually that much, code density of x86 for 64 bit systems isn't all that amazing. Its certainty not why they won.