Comment by cmrdporcupine
4 years ago
All of this is true except that there was no need for every vendor to have their own RISC ISA.
Which is why I'm saying with 20-20 hindsight it feels like they should have all just piled in on POWER. Of all of them born in that era, it's the only one still around. (Apart from ARM of course whose target was something else. MIPS is kinda just on life support.)
I don't remember the politics around the consortium there. I guess it could be that Sun and HP and the others just saw IBM as too much of a competition to want to be in bed with them. But given most of these vendors had shipped 68k arch workstations previously, I would have thought they'd be down with Motorola's offerings?
The problem in the end is these people all saw the other workstation vendors as competition rather than the actual competition, which was Windows/x86 (and later, Linux).
POWER was not originally open for use by others, under any license terms. It also was on the trailing edge of performance for many years. The original POWER 1 and POWER 2 boardsets were enormous power-sucking bastards with price tags to match. (Yes, boardsets. They were not even microprocessors.)
SPARC and MIPS were relatively open from day one but there were fewer takers than you would expect
SPARC had a number of licensees, but most of them chose to either re-use Sun software (Fujitsu, Solborne) or sell their chips directly through Sun (Ross, Weitek)
MIPS had many licensees but it ended up being bought by one of its most successful customers, SGI. Turns out, controlling the product direction is pretty important!
The point is, there were a lot of market forces piling up to drive people to play their own game, even it looks very silly 30 years on.