Quote Originally Posted by gowator
In computing terms the CISC chips are a perfect example....
Intel is a product of brute force and weight of numbers yet supremely sucessful. However Japan for instance has just designed a new chip for genetic calculations...
I'm not going to get involved in this particular debate, except to point out that, as you know, the technology that becomes the most successful in the marketplace is not necessarily the "best" technology (although, of course, "best" is always debatable). Betamax vs. VHS, for example.

It's fairly obvious (to me at least), that the reason the x86 architecture "won" in the marketplace (and Windows, along with it) is that the architecture became easily clonable and essentially "open." Anyone can go into business making and selling x86-compatible motherboards, cases, hard drives, peripherals, etc. This is, at the core, why "Wintel" won out over Apple.

A couple of interesting factoids regarding RISC CPUs: RISC CPUs are nothing new. Wikipedia says the first example of what we'd call a RISC-based computer today was a Cray designed in 1964.

Even more interesting (to me at least), is an article I found buried among a bunch of sales and marketing materials on an Apple reseller CD from 1991. It's an MS Word document entitled "The great RISC/CISC debate," which would indicate that years before Apple switched to PowerPC CPUs (in 1994), they had an internal debate going on about it.

("RISC" = Reduced Instruction Set Computing. "CISC" = Complex Instruction Set Computing. Intel and AMD x86 chips are CISC CPUs. See Wikipedia.com for more info.)