RichardC (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on April 5, 2017 4:31 am wrote:
>
> To some extent the eventual failure of RISC resulted from its original sweeping success in the
> 1980s and early 1990s - it was so compelling that everyone baked their own RISC, and we came
> into the mid-90s with several RISC contenders (SPARC, MIPS, Alpha, ARM, POWER/PowerPC, PA-RISC ...)
> and consequently a fragmented software ecosystem, and the revenues from the server and workstation
> markets spread across many competing ISAs.

I forgot know where I read it (EETimes' microprocessor report?) but not only were the RISC upstarts divided into a lot of separate efforts, but Intel's R&D budget was a lot larger (I always remember an order of magnitude higher but that does not seem right.) than all of them combined.

Intel's existing market position in low end systems financed their high end processor development and ARM seems to be in the same position now with Intel being on the high end but ARM's efforts seem a lot more divided so I am not convinced that alone will be enough for them to take the PC market.