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Taking a RISC

Rattner said the big change in the x86 was the advent of the Pentium Pro in 1996.

"Up to that point, it was all about instruction set architecture. We were all arguing instruction set architecture. Patterson and Hennessy were arguing for RISC, there was the ACE initiative and RISC is going to blow everything out of the water," Rattner, who is also a senior fellow at Intel, told InternetNews.com.

David Patterson is a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley who created the RISC design and authored a number of seminal books on computer architecture with John Hennessey, a computer engineering professor and now president of Stanford University. Both were advocates of the RISC architecture taking over from complex instruction set computer (CISC) processors like x86.

"Pentium Pro said I can deliver the performance of a RISC architecture and in some sense the simplicity of a RISC architecture and maintain compatibility with this growing body of legacy code," Rattner added.

Rattner thinks the x86 architecture has changed from a hardware structure to something more akin to an application programming interface. "It evolves, just like the Windows API evolves, the Mac OS API evolves. APIs are a little more robust here than the media formats," he said.

The RISC side of the argument fell short where it counted: it didn't produce the software needed to run that nifty processor, notes Tony Massimini, chief of technology with Semico Research.

"The RISC guys underestimated that Intel could continue to get performance out of the x86 and I don't think anyone really focused enough on the software," he told InternetNews.com. "They all said 'here's great hardware,' and I said 'ok, where's the OS? Where's the apps?' That was the question I kept asking in '94, '95 and there was never a good answer."

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Since then, he said, x86 has steadily grown as a high performance processor and the CISC vs. RISC war has died off as x86 is pretty much the only major architecture for computing. "I can't tell you the last time I heard someone argue for or debated someone that one instruction set architecture is better than another," said Rattner. The x86 will be around "until somebody proves otherwise. The burden of proof is on somebody else to come along and demonstrably prove otherwise."

So far no one has, and Reynolds figures no one will. "It can go on in perpetuity. People don't write in x86 code. There was a time, but now they write in C or Java that something else translates to x86," he said.

Massimini doubts anyone will knock x86 off its perch, either. "Never say never in this business but right now you would have to invest so much it would be a very difficult task," he said.

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