A new hope: The 1990s

The 1990s dawned just a few months after most of the Communist governments of Eastern and Central Europe had rolled over and played dead; by 1991, the Cold War was officially at an end. Those high-end UNIX workstation vendors who were left standing after the "microprocessor wars" scrambled to find new, non-military markets for their wares. Luckily, the commercialization and broad adoption of the Internet in the 1990s neatly stepped in to fill the gap. For at the beginning of that decade, you couldn't run an Internet server or even properly connect to the Internet on anything but UNIX. A side effect of this was that a large number of new people were introduced to the open-standards Free Software that ran the Internet.

The popularization of the Internet led to higher desktop sales as well, fueling growth in that sector. Throughout the 1990s, desktop chipmakers participated in a mad speed race to keep up with "Moore's Law" -- often neglecting other areas of their chips' architecture to pursue elusive clock rate milestones.

32-bitness, so coveted in the 1980s, gave way to 64-bitness. The first high-end UNIX processors would blazon the 64-bit trail at the very start of the 1990s, and by the time of this writing, most desktop systems had joined them. The POWER™ and PowerPC family, introduced in 1990, had a 64-bit ISA from the beginning.

Power Architecture

IBM introduced the POWER architecture -- a multichip RISC design -- in early 1990. By the next year, the first single-chip PowerPC derivatives (the product of the Apple-IBM-Motorola AIM alliance) were available as a high-volume alternative to the predominating CISC desktop structure.

Where is Power Architecture technology now?
Power Architecture technology is popular in all markets, from the high-end UNIX eServer™ to embedded systems. When used on the desktop, it is often known as the Apple G5. The cooperative climate of the original AIM alliance has been expanded into an organization by name of Power.org.

DEC Alpha

In 1992, DEC introduced the Alpha 21064 at a speed of 200MHz. The superscalar, superpipelined 64-bit processor design was pure RISC, but it outperformed the other chips and was referred to by DEC as the world's fastest processor. (When the Pentium was launched the next spring, it only ran at 66MHz.) The Alpha too was intended to be used in both UNIX server/workstations as well as desktop variants.

The primary contribution of the Alpha design to microprocessor history was not in its architecture -- that was pure RISC. The Alpha's performance was due to excellent implementation. The microchip design process is dominated by automated logic synthesis flows. To deal with the extremely complex VAX architecture, Digital designers applied human, individually crafted attention to circuit design. When this was applied to a simple, clean architecture like the RISC-based Alpha, the combination gleaned the highest possible performance.

Where is Alpha now?
Sadly, the very thing that led Alpha down the primrose path -- hand-tuned circuits -- would prove to be its undoing. As DEC was going out of business, , its chip division, Digital Semiconductor, was sold to Intel as part of a legal settlement. Intel used the StrongARM (a joint project of DEC and ARM) to replace its i860 and i960 line of RISC processors.

The Clone Wars begin

In March 1991, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduced its clone of Intel's i386DX. It ran at clock speeds of up to 40MHz. This set a precedent for AMD -- its goal was not just cheaper chips that would run code intended for Intel-based systems, but chips that would also outperform the competition. AMD chips are RISC designs internally; they convert the Intel instructions to appropriate internal operations before execution.

Also in 1991, litigation between AMD and Intel was finally settled in favor of AMD, leading to a flood of clonemakers -- among them, Cyrix, NexGen, and others -- few of which would survive into the next decade.

In the desktop space, Moore's Law turned into a Sisyphean treadmill as makers chased elusive clock speed milestones.

Where are they now?
Well, of course, AMD is still standing. In fact, its latest designs are being cloned by Intel!

Cyrix was acquired by National Semiconductor in 1997, and sold to VIA in 1999. The acquisition turned VIA into a processor player, where it had mainly offered core logic chipsets before. The company today specializes in high-performance, low-power chips for the mobile market.

CISC

CISC was a retroactive term. It was coined and applied to processors after the fact, in order to distinguish traditional CPUs from the new RISC designs. Then in 1993, Intel introduced the Pentium, which was a pipelined, in-order superscalar architecture. It was also backwards-compatible with the older x86 architecture and was thus almost a "hybrid" chip -- a blend of RISC and CISC design ideas. Later, the Pentium Pro included out-of-order code execution and branch prediction logic, another typically RISC concept.