The last time the CPU makers got into a flap, it was Intel’s Complex Instruction Set Computers (CISC) versus the workstation CPU makers (HP-PA, Sun SPARC, DEC Alpha, Motorola 88000, and the MIPS processors) and their Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC) machines. Intel won the battle because of all the CISC code running on low-end PCs. The installed base of UNIX code running on workstations at the time just couldn’t hold any significant market share at the desktop. But Intel did adopt some RISC techniques in their x86 cores after the dust settled.
