Rasmussen Consulting Group
April, 2005
Intel and the RISC Wars
One of the largest threats to Intel and its dominance of the PC microprocessor world occurred in
the early 1990s with the emergence of the first commercial RISC microprocessors and a large computer
industry driven initiative called the ACE consortium. Nearly every Intel ally, from operating system
partner Microsoft to leading customers including Compaq was actively planning to switch server
architectures away from the aging x86 to a new platform. The ACE consortium created clear danger to
Intel’s high-end business and a strong, potential threat to their entire personal computer franchise. This
paper covers the scope of those threats and how Intel was able to cull together a strategy to effectively
respond, reducing the threat of ACE and actually strengthening its position in the long run.
In 1985 Intel made a gut-wrenching strategic shift away from memories as its primary product line
and towards microprocessors. The popularity of the PC-AT and similar clones based on the 8086, 80286,
80386 and 80486 (1989) had minimized the threat of most other microprocessor architectures including the
Motorola 68000 family upon which Apple computers and Sun Microsystems UNIX machines were based.
Intel and Motorola were increasingly dominating the microprocessor market. Intel and Microsoft
had successfully staved off competition in the PC space from AMD, Cyrix, Chips and Technologies and
IBM1. Motorola 680x0 family was at the heart of machines ranging from Apple’s Macintosh to Sun
workstations. By 1986, 90% of the PCs shipped were based on Intel processors and 90% of workstations
were based on Motorola processors.
One key factor of the continued success of the Intel microprocessor architecture was backward
code compatibility, allowing software written for older processor generations to run on current machines2.
This compatibility and the resultant longevity of software proved to be a boon to consumers. However,
each successive generation of these Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) architectures contained
circuitry that executed all instructions from previous generation while adding new instructions to improve
performance. This requirement to run ‘legacy’ code created problems and complexity when designing new
processors. Thus, the time between processor introductions was growing and the incremental speed
improvement between each generation (on a percentage basis) was slowing.
1
One of the main reasons why IBM chose the 8088 as the basis for the IBM PC was they had manufacturing rights.
This code base of legacy software became the core message for a marketing program in the mid 1980s, internally
known as “Project Crush”, designed to gain design wins for Intel over competing architectures of the time.
2
Rick Rasmussen prepared this note for the course BCEMBA 7017-200 Strategic Management of the Enterprise as
taught by Professor Paul Tiffany during Winter Quarter 2005 as a basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate
either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation.
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1
Intel and the RISC Wars
RISC Microprocessors
The theoretical basis for Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC) was the 80/20 rule – 20
percent of the operations were run 80 percent of the time. These 20 percent should be in hardware (silicon)
while the balance can be done in software. Standardized operating systems such as UNIX, based on a
computer language called “C”, created an environment where benchmarks could be developed and
instruction sets optimized.
The RISC “less is more” philosophy was believed to be an elegant way to overcome the trend that
microprocessors were becoming increasingly difficult and complex to design and fabricate. The
complexity was in large part due to the fact that each new generation had to contain circuits that continued
to run the instructions of the last generation. The requirement to retain compatibility with legacy
implementations increased transistor counts (and therefore cost) as well as complexity (and therefore
design time and system speed). RISC microprocessors were simpler and more streamlined because they
relegated much of the lesser-used and more complex operations to software. Thus, sophisticated compilers
could translate legacy code to run on newer and faster machines.
UC Berkeley's RISC project started in 1980 under the direction of Professor David Patterson. The
RISC-I processor in 1982 contained just over 44,000 transistors compared with averages of about 100,000
in newer CISC designs and yet completely outperformed any other single-chip design. They followed this
up with the 40,760 transistor RISC-II in 1983, which ran over three times as fast as RISC-I. Even to this
day, almost all modern RISC processors are based on the principles of the RISC-II design.
In 1981, Professor John Hennessy3 of Stanford University started a similar project called MIPS
(for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages4). The project saw first silicon in 1983 and was
soon followed by MIPS-X, a more powerful and robust architecture. Based on the promised shown by
these projects, Hennessy left Stanford in 1984 to starting a company called MIPS Computer Systems.
MIPS’ first design, named the R2000, differed in several respects from the Stanford work (including a
floating point coprocessor) but was true to the basic theme of marrying silicon and compiler technology to
maximize overall system efficiency. The first processors shipped in 1986 to great commercial acclaim.
Within the next two years, similar RISC development efforts produced the Motorola 88000, the INMOS
Transputer, the Acorn Advanced RISC Machine (ARM), the HP Precision Architecture (HP-PA) and the
AMD 29000.
UNIX Operating System
Much of the RISC efforts were focused towards optimizing the speed workstations running the
UNIX operating system. UNIX has a long and varied lineage. The original work occurred at in the early
1970s at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories by Dennis Ritchey and Ken Thompson. AT&T made UNIX available
to universities and commercial firms, as well as the United States government under licenses. In the mid
and late 1970s, Berkeley and other institutions used UNIX as a development platform to teach operating
system design. Sun Microsystems chose UNIX as the operating system for its line of workstations based on
a commercial derivative of the work done by Sun founder Bill Joy while he was attending UC Berkeley.
One of the key strengths of UNIX is its portability as evidenced by its appearance on a large
number of different platforms. Each vendor (and often each product line from each vendor) ran a version of
UNIX such as Domain/OS for Apollo Computers or IRIX for Silicon Graphics workstations, tailored for
that machine. The benefit to this circumstance was the ability for UNIX to evolve since each supplier had
incentive to innovate, adding extra features as needed to satisfy customer requirements.
3
Hennessy later returned to Stanford and became President of the University in September, 2000
The term “pipeline” refers to each step or stage in the computation process. Processors have multiple steps or
“stages” that, if kept full, mean the processor is running at high efficiency.
4
2
Intel and the RISC Wars
One strong impediment to growth was the lack of a single “industry standard” UNIX platform that
would allow Independent Software Vendors (ISVs5) to develop one software package that could run on
machines offered by multiple vendors. As a result, ISV had to create custom versions of their software
applications for each new hardware vendor. It was increasingly clear that a unified UNIX platform would
greatly increase the market potential for workstations and possibly form a bridge to the desktop world.
AT&T initiated the effort to establish a standard UNIX operating system in 1987 by merging
features from Xenix6, BSD7, SunOS and System V into System V Release 4 (SVR4). This new release
incorporated most of the previous features into one package in an attempt to spell the end of competing
versions. Unfortunately, this attempt to unify only galvanized the competition in workstation operating
systems.
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems (Stanford University Network) was founded in 1982 by Bill Joy, Andy
Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla and Scott McNeely, and began shipping its first Motorola 680x0-based
workstation products later that year. The company grew rapidly by offering a range of “standard” UNIXbased machines with much better price-performance than the minicomputers of the day. However, the
company quickly became constrained by the price/performance and introduction pace of the Motorola
processors. Furthermore, these off-the-shelf devices were available to competitors such as Apollo
Computers. Sun felt it needed a path to greater independence.
In 1985, Sun began an internal project with Fujitsu to commercialize UC Berkeley’s RISC-II
design. The project, called SPARC for Scalable Processor ARChitecture, first went public in July 1987
when Sun introduced its first SPARC-based system, the Sun-4/260, with 10 MIPS performance. Sun's use
of a RISC chip in their new machines that demonstrated that the benefits of the RISC approach were real
and interest in RISC-based machines skyrocketed.
Sun passed Apollo Computer in 1987 as the leading workstation vendor and had aspirations to
produce the same type of success that the IBM-PC had seen eight years earlier. At the time it was
“common wisdom” that the reason the market for the IBM-PC grew so rapidly was that the PC was an
“open” architecture – that is, any vendor who wished to enter the market could purchased standardized
components and operating system software from third-parties, begin manufacturing and seeking new
customers. This open-ness in turn drove ISVs to port or develop new software applications on the platform
which further drove demand for the underlying hardware.
In 1988, Sun and AT&T (the originator of UNIX) together with Motorola, Fujitsu, Toshiba, and
Unisys announced a new consortium called UNIX International intended to drive the definition and
development of protocols to allow different versions of UNIX (e.g. AT&T’s System V and SunOS) to run
the same application software. As a public demonstration of commitment, AT&T announced it would
acquire 20% of Sun Microsystems.
Sun ignited the UNIX workstation market in 1989 with the introduction of SPARCstation I. This
platform at 12.5 MIPS8 offered a huge delta in price performance over existing workstations, becoming the
first true UNIX workstation to sell for under $9000. To many observers, it appeared that UNIX could
begin to compete not only at the server level, but also threatened to become adopted for desktop
applications.
5
ISV or Independent Software Vendor is a company that makes application software (e.g. word processor, database,
spreadsheet) that runs on top of another company’s operating system.
6
Xenix was Microsoft's UNIX-based operating system for x86-PCs, first announced in 1980.
7
BSD or Berkeley Software Design is the UNIX code base that came from the work done at UC Berkeley
8
Here MIPS is used in the traditional form, Millions of Instructions per Second, a benchmark of performance.
3
Intel and the RISC Wars
Sun was working hard to bring new versions of its SPARC processor to market at all priceperformance levels. Sun enlisted the help of several of their major semiconductor vendors to put their own
design resources on the SPARC teams in return for volume commitments from Sun as well as rights to
market their chips to other systems vendors.
1n 1989, Sun announced the formation of SPARC
International that would own the rights to the SPARC trademark and development responsibility for the
SPARC processor instruction set (in essence, the architecture).
Several disparate groups became active in SPARC International, most notably semiconductor
licensees including Texas Instruments, LSI Logic, Cypress Semiconductor, Ross Technology9 and Fujitsu
Microelectronics. System manufacturers including Solbourne, Tatung and Tadpole brought early “SPARC
clones” to market.
Digital Equipment Corporation
Founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was based in “the old mill”
in Maynard, MA. DEC became the pre-eminent manufacturer of a new class of machines known as
minicomputers (as contrasted to the mainframes made by IBM and others). Rather than being ensconced in
glass rooms and touched only by IT professionals as mainframes were, minicomputers found their way into
the engineering labs of many companies and universities around the world. Olsen was an engineer and the
company was run for engineers, by engineers. By the late 1980s, DEC’s PDP (Programmable Data
Processor) and the successor VAX (Virtual Address eXtension) series propelled DEC to become the second
largest computer manufacturer behind IBM with nearly 100,000 employees.
In 1984, DEC entered the workstation10 market. Their proprietary products were designed to be
hardware and software compatible with DEC’s large installed bases of VAX minicomputers. In 1988, the
VAXstation 2000 was the highest volume workstation in the industry but the company was losing sales to
Sun and Apollo whenever standard UNIX operating systems were specified, particularly in DECs core
engineering and government markets. With the VAX line of machines aging and UNIX on the rise, DEC
was looking to move to a new architecture and committed a ‘bet the company’ play on RISC technology.
DECs internal RISC effort (called Prism) was faltering and for the first time in the company’s history, DEC
needed outside help.
DECs management began a series of high-profile moves to position DEC as a player in the
emerging open standards environment. In 1988, in response to the AT&T-Sun alliance and the formation of
Unix International, IBM, DEC, HP, Apollo and several other major computer companies form the Open
Software Foundation to set a UNIX counter-standard to Unix International. In September of that year,
DEC signed an agreement with MIPS for $15M for access to all current and future MIPS architectures,
designs and related system software. It also invested an additional $10M for a 5% equity stake. Soon
thereafter, DEC launched its first “open systems’ platform – the DECstation 3100 workstation, based upon
the brand-new MIPS RISC R3000 processor.
MIPS Computer Systems
Stanford Professor John Hennessey took a leave of absence in 1984 to start MIPS Computer
Systems, Inc. The company’s original business plan was to emerge as a fabless semiconductor company
commercializing the Stanford MIPS project and had a desire to become a microprocessor company of the
likes of Intel or Motorola. The MIPS R2000 (1986) and R3000 (1988) hit the market to huge technical
acclaim and claimed several early design with leading edge workstation companies including Silicon
Graphics, Inc Ardent Computers, and Pyramid Technologies. However, volumes generated by these early
9
Ross Technology, Inc was founded by Motorola designer Roger Ross, later purchased by Cypress, then sold to Fujitsu
in 1993
10
Workstations are single cabinet, microprocessor-based computers, networked and intended for multiple users.
4
Intel and the RISC Wars
sales could not generate sufficient monies to recoup the company’s large development costs. By 1987, they
had burned through all but $1 million of their $22M venture financing and were facing a $16M deficit. At
that point, the board decided to embark on a major shift in direction and hired computer industry veteran
Robert Miller11 as chairman and CEO.
Miller struck out on a strategy to make the MIPS architecture an industry standard. He quickly
raised $20M from Japan’s Kubota Corporation (a farm equipment manufacturer looking to diversify into
high technology) for a 20% stake plus $5M in development funds and a commitment to build a $100M
factory for MIPS in Japan. Realizing that others could do a better job at actual semiconductor
manufacturing and sales, he signed manufacturing/resale licenses with domestic chip suppliers
Performance Semiconductor (then a foundry for MIPS) plus LSI Logic, IDT and BIT12. These smaller
companies were soon joined by Japan’s NEC and Germany’s Siemens. In addition to allowing MIPS to
focus on system-level product development, these licenses (selling for $1M to $10M plus royalties)
provided a much-needed source of revenue.
The MIPS strategy struck a chord with computer manufacturers that had relied on their own
proprietary systems for sales in the 1970s and 1980s but were seeing sales and market share falling as their
own installed base began to wither in the face of open systems architectures from Sun and others. MIPS
began courting every hardware company (except for Sun) that was interested in offering a new line of
RISC-based workstation machines and offering whatever assistance it could to bring these products to
market. MIPS flexible business model meant customers could engage at the component level (buying
microprocessors from silicon vendors and compilers from MIPS), purchase boards or remarket entire
systems. This model appealed to management at many former computer giants including Control Data,
Olivetti, Bull, Prime and Wang, which began to manufacture or OEM MIPS-based systems to their legacy
customer base. In addition to early system sales, MIPS sold multi-million dollar architectural licenses to
DEC, Sony, Olivetti and others that gave these companies some measure of security and control over their
own destiny. Based largely on these license sales, MIPS became profitable and Miller took the company
public in 1989.
AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola)
IBM’s choice of the Intel 8088 microprocessor as the heart of the original IBM-PC was the single
most important event in Intel’s history. The two companies worked closely together and continued to
cooperate through the various processor generations. However, IBM had its own internal research and
development programs outside of the PC group.
IBM’s first RISC efforts started in 1975, preceding the work at Berkeley and Stanford. The “801”
started as a pure research project at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in building 801. They were
looking for ways to improve performance of their existing machines, studying traces of programs running
on System/370 mainframes and looking at the compiler code. From this project came the idea that it was
possible to make a very small and efficient microprocessor running only a few instructions. The 801 effort
was first commercialized as the ROMP (1982) launched as part of the, underperforming, high-priced RT
PC in 1986. However, the lessons learned through the 801 and ROMP projects, formed the basis of
knowledge for the development of the POWER PC architecture which was first used in the popular R/6000
line of workstations running IBM’s version of UNIX called AIX,
In 1991 IBM approached Apple to collaborate on a project known as the Common Hardware
Reference Platform (CHRP). The intent was to create a new generation of machines to compete with (and
supercede) the IBM PC. While CHRP never materialized, the cooperation ultimately led to the Apple
11
Robert “Bob” Miller had spent years at IBM and was a key executive at Data General.
IDT is the acronym for Integrated Device Technology, Inc – an SRAM supplier and chief competitor to Cypress
Semiconductor. BIT, or Bipolar Integrated Technologies was a fabricator of a high-speed, high-power specialty
process known as ECL used in the R6000 MIPS processor.
12
5
Intel and the RISC Wars
considering a switch from its existing Motorola 68000 family processors over to IBM’s POWER
architecture.
Motorola, the leading microprocessor vendor of the early 1980s, had a strong history of success
with its 8-bit 6800 and 16-bit 68000 processor lines. The company was second behind Intel as the 68000
family was used by nearly every workstation manufacturer as well as Apple’s Macintosh. Motorola’s
RISC effort wasn’t anywhere near as successful. Motorola was struggling with its 88000 RISC design and
made the strategic mistake of not providing any backward compatibility with their own famous 68000
series, forcing customers to port to a brand new architecture. Furthermore, by splitting its resources
between two architectures Motorola was now losing on both fronts due to time-to-market and performance
issues.
As Motorola's largest customers of desktop-class microprocessors, Apple brought Motorola into
the discussions because Apple felt that Motorola had more experience manufacturing high-volume
microprocessors than IBM and was seeking a second source. Thus, Motorola was willing to drop it’s own
internal development efforts in favor of joining an IBM, Apple PowerPC partnership. This three-way
collaboration became known as AIM, for Apple, IBM, Motorola. The relationship between IBM and
Apple grew beyond a microprocessor partnership when they formed Taligent in 1992, an independent
company chartered with defining new methods for software development and an entirely new nextgeneration operating system.
Microsoft
In 1975, Paul Allen and Bill Gates founded “Micro-soft” in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The
company’s first product was software for the Altair 8800, a hobbyist computer manufactured by their
former local employer MITS. Microsoft's defining moment came in the late 1970s when IBM chose MSDOS as one of the operating systems released with the IBM Personal Computer (PC) in 1981. The early
1980s saw a flood of IBM PC clones, and Microsoft was quick to use its position to dominate the operating
system market.
In 1985, Microsoft and IBM began jointly working on a successor to the MS-DOS operating
system, a project called OS/2. IBM wrote the core instructions while Microsoft worked on the user
interface. Together they brought the first product to market in 1987 to limited fanfare. At the time, it
became clear that the two companies had differing technical views and marketing priorities. Microsoft and
IBM disbanded their joint activities and Microsoft focused its mainstream efforts on Windows13, a user
interface residing atop MS-DOS. Because it was a DOS-based platform, Windows had inherent
performance and functionality limitations. Microsoft also recognized the threat of UNIX and believed the
openly warring UNIX factions created a potential opportunity.
In August 1988, Microsoft hired architect Dave Cutler away from Digital where he led DECs
Seattle lab developing new chip and operating system architectures. Cutler was to head Microsoft’s
internal OS/2 3.0 development effort, renamed OS/2 NT for New Technology. The NT group eventually
grew to 200 engineers and scrambled to bring a demonstrable product to market. Bill Gates imposed two
technical goals which dramatically increased the project scope: the operating system had to run DOS and
Windows applications without modification and it had to be portable – capable of running on Intel as well
as other processor architectures.
In 1990, Microsoft released Windows 3.0 and later 3.1 to great market acceptance. With the
success of Sun in the marketplace, analysts began to question Microsoft’s server strategy. Microsoft first
demonstrated Windows NT on an Intel platform at the August 1991 Windows Developer’s Conference.
Windows NT was being developed as a high-end server-based operating system. Intel x86, while the
13
Version 1.0 of Windows was shipped as early as 1983 but the program was not deemed commercially mainstream
until version 3.0 was released in 1990 and version 3.1 in 1992.
6
Intel and the RISC Wars
standard for desktop machines, was not viewed as having enough horsepower for high-end use. It was
increasingly clear that the new generation of RISC architectures outperformed existing or planned Intelbased microprocessor implementations. With DEC joining the ranks of the MIPS camp and high-end PC
companies (particularly Compaq) showing strong interest in the workstation market, it was time for
Microsoft to make a bold move.
Intel Corporation
In the late 1980s, Intel had already survived several attempts on its core microprocessor business
and was trying to use various ploys to starve companies out of the I/O and graphics chip markets.
Sun SPARC workstations were being well received in the marketplace. The MIPS R3000 had
been garnering industry notice and was a favorite among workstation vendors such as Silicon Graphics.
Intel was concerned these new offerings easily outperformed their upcoming 80486 -- and the advantages
of RISC were likely to give other processor vendors a technical advantage over Intel's older CISC-based
designs.
In August 1988, Intel began positioning the unannounced 80486 against the RISC offerings of the
day using software as their historic strength. As reported in EE Times: “Even though Intel is months
behind the competition and will not begin showing the device to computer makers until early next year,
analysts think Intel could still become a force in the workstation and minicomputer market. The timing is a
disadvantage, but being Intel is an advantage, and being able to run MS/DOS, OS/2 and Unix is a big
advantage.”
In November 1988, it was announced that the 80486 would not meet performance expectations:
Earlier reports had given the impression that the chip would operate four times faster than the 80386. But
John Crawford, chief architect of the 386, pronounced that the 80486 would perform at “twice what you see
today in the 80386”. At that performance, the 80486 would still be significantly slower than a number of
RISC processors on the market, including SPARC, MIPS, AMD’s 29000 and Motorola’s 88000, most of
which had a three of four times performance lead over the 386.
Attempting to heap disdain on the ever-growing list of competitors. Intel took to calling these
offerings YARPs, (Yet Another RISC Processor). Still, customers, analysts, and the press continued to
hound Intel to come up with an answer to the impending threat of these new RISC offerings. At that point,
Intel’s tactics became more aggressive.
In January 1989, a deliberate campaign of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD14) starts with the
announcement of a ‘mystery chip’ dubbed the N10: Intel's terse description of the chip's performance states
that it can carry out 150 million operations per second. That would be about 30 times more powerful than
the company's high-end 80386 microprocessor and five to 10 times faster than the impending 80486.
Analysts gushed even without many of the details, "It is unquestionably a terrific chip," said Adam Cuhney,
an analyst at Kidder Peabody & Co. "It will make them a major factor to have to contend with in high-end
machines." The N10 was unveiled in February 1989 as the i860.
The i860 was actually a research project that was never intended to be a stand-alone processor. It
was publicly transformed from a proof-of-concept, high-end 80486 math coprocessor into a stand-alone
RISC processor with all the promise in the world. However, without any software or operating system, the
chip was useless to customers. Intel was using the i860 as a defensive tactic in the RISC wars. Intel
quickly attempted to grab the specsmanship high ground by announcing the i860 as the “highest
performance RISC processor on the market” with no less than Andy Grove saying, …”this isn’t just a
coprocessor chip. This could be the central processor of a super technical workstation.”
14
See Appendix for a detailed definition and historic examples.
7
Intel and the RISC Wars
In September 1989, Intel brought another ‘red herring’ out of the labs and into the press with the
announcement of the “superscalar15” RISC-based i960MC. BiiN - a company formed by Intel and Siemens
to develop fault tolerant high-performance multi-processor computers, designed the i960. The whole
project was considered within Intel to have been so poorly managed that the company name was considered
to be an acronym for Billions Invested In Nothing. However, the resulting i960MC CPU served its purpose
as a RISC “strawman” showcase for Intel even though it was repositioned for use as a controller in
hardware applications such as laser printers and network appliances. As marketing tools, the i860 and i960
served their purpose and quieted the analysts for the time.
1990 was a good year for Intel as it launched the much-anticipated 80486 in April. The steady
stream of system announcements and performance improvements in the pipeline served to stave off the
RISC threat for a few months. However, beginning in December 1990, Intel started leaking advanced
information of the “586” (code name P5), in order to take some of the attention away announcements to
come.
ACE Consortium
In January 1991, MIPS and the semiconductor partners announced the R4000 to great fanfare. As
the first “super-pipelined16” CPU, the processor represented a significant performance improvement over
all competing offerings at the time. Even though the R4000 was not scheduled to become available in
volume for a year, word began to leak about secret meetings held in California between Compaq, Digital
Equipment Corporation (DEC), Microsoft and Santa Cruz Operations (SCO)17 to define a next generation
PC specification based on the R4000. The Hamilton Group (named for the DEC building located on
Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto, CA where first meetings were held) was the seed for what was to become
the Advance Computing Environment (ACE).
In April 1991, a group of 21 major computer and software companies--led by Compaq, Microsoft,
MIPS, DEC and SCO -- publicly announced the development of a set of specifications to define an
"advanced computing environment" for the 1990s and beyond. Besides the headlining quintet, the other
ACE members were Acer, Control Data, Kubota, NEC, NKK, Olivetti, Prime, Pyramid, Nixdorf, Silicon
Graphics, Sony, Sumitomo, Tandem, Wang, and Zenith Data Systems.
ACE members agreed to define and develop “ACE-compatible” machines that would run
Microsoft’s OS/2 3.0 as well as other UNIX-type operating systems (initially OpenDesktop from SCO).
ACE-compatibles would ideally be microprocessor independent but initially based on the Intel and the
MIPS R4000 architectures. ACE’s primary benefit is “binary software compatibility” amongst differing
hardware platforms. Up until the time, each new application (e.g. word processors, spreadsheets, email
programs, etc.) had to be re-compiled18 for each different hardware/operating system combination. ACE
15
Superscalar refers to a chip implementation with multiple execution units on the same chip, thus the potential exists
to have more than one operation occurring at the same time.
16
Super-pipelined means that primary operations are subdivided into smaller steps (a deeper pipeline) so clock speed
can be increased. Of course, each instruction will now take more cycles to complete (latency), but the processor will
still be completing one instruction per cycle (same throughput), and there will be more cycles per second, so the
processor will complete more instructions per second (higher actual performance).
17
Santa Cruz Operations, better known as SCO, was the leading shipper of standardized UNIX operating systems for
Intel platforms, based upon AT&T’s System V version 4 (SVR4). SCO was partially owned by Microsoft.
18
Compilation or re-compilation is the last critical step in constructing a program to run on a computer. It is the
translation of human-readable source code to the “1s and 0s” binary machine language that actually runs on a
computer. In order to sell programs on each system manufacturer’s hardware, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)
had to produce a new and different compiled version for each unique OS/hardware combination, a complex process
fraught with logistical problems, that had the effect of limiting the number of software programs available for any
given machine.
8
Intel and the RISC Wars
promised an API (Application Program Interface) that ease software development and cross-platform
compatibility with the goal of bringing "shrink-wrapped" software to RISC workstations.
Some viewed ACE as primarily a political action: the establishment of a new group of companies,
many of them competitors, banding together to challenge the power of Sun Microsystems and, to a lesser
degree, Intel, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. For Compaq, it was also a business strategy for moving beyond
commodity PCs into RISC workstations.
For Intel, ACE was a direct threat to the monopoly it enjoyed as the only hardware architecture
that would run Microsoft operating systems. Intel was doubly threatened as the competing microprocessors
(e.g. MIPS and the PowerPC) were outperforming all then-current and then-planned implementations of the
x86 architecture. Publicly ACE draws Intel’s disdain. VP of the microprocessor division David House
scoffs, "[ACE] is a tempest in a teapot". CEO Andy Grove says, “RISC is a technology of the have-nots”.
Rikki Kirzner, senior industry analyst at Dataquest Inc differs: "ACE is a slap in the face to Intel.
What ACE really signifies is that PC maker and ACE cornerstone Compaq Computer Corp. has recognized
its need to grow rapidly into higher-performance workstations in order to evade its PC competitors and
has embraced MIPS's RISC architecture to do it. In essence, Compaq has decided that [Intel's] plans for
next-generation 586 and 686 chips are great, but Intel isn't getting there fast enough."
Intel begins to scramble. To combat the RISC threat, Intel press announcements (and leaks) at the
time promised the P5 would be out by early 1992, with volume production in fall of that year. The chips
would drop right into the current 80486 sockets (in some flavors). Clock speeds would start at 66 MHz
with higher speeds soon to follow and would be two times faster than 80486 (integer) and 4-10 times faster
than the 486 (floating point), far better performer than the MIPS R3000 and comparable to the new R4000.
Intel attempted to inject fear and doubt into consortium members. The main public theme was to
have buyers think, "Why should I design in a competitors chip, when Intel's will be far faster, and is only a
couple months away?" Of course, if Intel fails to release on time, or fails to deliver promised performance,
Intel is still better off than doing nothing so there is almost no risk or downside. Against this backdrop,
Intel launched the initial “Intel Inside” campaign in July 1991. By the end of the year over 300 companies
had agreed to participate.
Intel was particularly upset with Compaq. Compaq’s mainstream PC business was growing
rapidly as the recession of the time was abating. Compaq volume products depended heavily on Intel for
microprocessors sold at favorable prices. Furthermore, Compaq engineering required timely access to
specifications and samples for advanced 80486 models as well as the P5. ACE placed great strain on the
Intel/Compaq relationship, both public and private. There was no evidence of illegal activity, just implied
threats, or little actions and hints -- but Intel’s marketing and sales people did get the message across.
Public Moves
• Pre-announce P5 (Pentium)
• Over promise P5 schedule
• Large push in press
• Intel Inside
Private (non-public) moves
•
Lower production allocations for current products
•
Raise prices (or delay price cuts)
•
Withhold technical information on next generation products.
Compaq management weighed the reward of ACE against the risks of losing favorable treatment
from Intel and eventually renounced their membership in the consortium. With Compaq out, Intel was able
to lessen customer enthusiasm for the ACE consortium and eventually get many members to pull out
altogether. The ACE Consortium suffered a fatal blow when Compaq withdrew. By the end of 1992, the
alliance quietly disbanded.
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Intel and the RISC Wars
Post Mortem: 1993 –
As written in the industry journal “Microprocessor Report”: In response to the RISC threat from
ACE, Intel accelerated its P5 program [later named the Pentium] and began showing up at every PC
industry conference touting the P5 as being only a few months behind the R4000 and offering higher
performance. The PC industry seemed to buy Intel's story. As a result, the ACE effort collapsed, and the P5
-- still a paper tiger -appeared to have triumphed. In the meantime, however, the P5 slipped... by the time
the P5 is shipping, [MIPS was] shipping the R4400 with perhaps 50% better performance than the P5.
Intel's preemptive strike against the ACE initiative turns out to be, at best, a result of wishful thinking, and
at worst, a fraud. (MPR 061503)
Intel:
The P5, renamed Pentium, was formally announced in October 1993. The earliest Pentiums were
released at the clock speeds of 66 MHz and 60 MHz. Pentium architecture chips offered just under twice
the performance of an 80486 processor per clock cycle. The fastest Intel 80486 parts were almost the same
speed as a first-generation Pentium, and AMD 80486s performed roughly equal to the Pentium-75.
Although the official minimum clock speed was 66 MHz, they were only able to build 60MHz
devices for the first several months. Delivery problems were compounded when in October 1994, it was
discovered that early Pentiums had a problem in the floating-point unit that, in rare cases, resulted in
reduced precision of division operations. The Pentium FDIV bug was first denied then downplayed by
Intel. Later, they created an exchange program to replace the faulty processors with corrected ones.
The Pentium production ramp proved to be slower than anyone’s expectations and dramatically
underperformed when compared against earlier public announcements19. Volume shipments of the first
buggy chips only started by the end of 1994 and working chips volume shipments weren’t available until
the end of 1995. Also, Pentium Overdrive chips (compatible with 80486s) arrived over 18 months later
than promised.
In 1994, Intel renewed it’s Intel Inside campaign specifically to encourage demand for the
Pentium processor, fueled by a $150M war chest – a marketing budget unheard of up to that time for any
technology company.
In June 1994, Hewlett-Packard and Intel announced a joint research-and-development project
aimed at providing advanced technologies for end-of-the-decade workstation, server and enterprisecomputing products. This effort includes development of a full 64-bit instruction set and compiler
optimization (IA-64). After several false starts, they were able to deliver the initial chips in 2001 (code
named Merced). Intel entered the RISC business a decade after the ACE consortium disbanded.
In 1999, the Federal Trade Commission negotiated a settlement with Intel aimed to avoid full antitrust proceedings against the company. The crux of the settlement revolved around Intel’s repeated pattern
of a dominant company using its intellectual property as a weapon or an excuse to force deals from
customers or weaker partners. Unfortunately for Compaq and the ACE consortium, this settlement “closed
the barn doors long after the horses had fled”.
Microsoft:
Microsoft released the first commercial version of Windows NT 3.1 in July 1993. As promised, it
supported Intel and MIPS as well as DEC Alpha and IBM/Motorola PowerPC processors20. Sales on non19
The first P5 chips benchmarked 1.5 times faster than mid-range 80486's against promises of two times faster than
cutting edge 80486s. For floating point operations, they benchmarked as 4x better than the 80486 against promises of
10x improvement.
20
Intergraph Corporation ported Windows NT to its Clipper architecture and later SPARC but neither version was sold
to the public.
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Intel and the RISC Wars
Intel processors never came close to meeting expectations. Windows NT 4.0 was the last major release to
support Alpha, MIPS, or PowerPC, though development of Windows NT 5.0 (Windows 2000) for Alpha
continued until 1999 when Compaq (who had purchased DEC) stopped support for Windows NT on that
architecture.
In October 2001, Microsoft released Windows NT 5.1, better known as Windows XP as their sole
and unified platform for desktops and servers. The letters "XP" originate from the word "Experience”.
While Windows remains the dominant operating system for desktop machines, the Windows/UNIX battle
still rages to this day.
UNIX:
By 1993 most UNIX vendors had changed their commercial variants of UNIX to be based upon
AT&T’s System V Release 4 (SVR4) but many added features from BSD as well – so no single standard
ever emerged. Shortly after SVR4 was placed into the market, AT&T sold all its rights to UNIX to Novell.
In 1994, Novell decided to split and sell off their bundle of UNIX-related assets. The UNIX
trademark and the certification rights were sold to the X/Open Consortium, an industry group created to
define a "UNIX Standard". Finally X/OPEN and OSF/1 (a competitor to the SVR4 standardization)
merged, creating the Open Group. Various standards by the Open Group now define what is and what isn't
a "UNIX" operating system.
In 1995, the business of administration and support of the existing UNIX licenses plus rights to
further develop the System V code base were transferred to the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). Novell
retained the core copyrights, veto rights over future licensing activities of SCO, and 95% of the licensing
revenue.
Linux, a version of UNIX developed by Linus Torvalds, has seen a huge rise in popularity and
although it is open source, companies such as Red Hat and SUSE (purchased by Novell) have emerged to
provide commercially supported versions. In 2000, the Santa Cruz Operation sold its entire UNIX business
and assets to Caldera Systems. In March 2003, Caldera, renamed the SCO Group (SCO) filed a lawsuit
against IBM claiming that IBM had contributed portions of SCO's intellectual property to the Linux kernel
in violation of IBM's license to use UNIX. Additionally, SCO sent letters to a number of companies
warning that their use of Linux without a license from SCO may be actionable, and claimed in the press
that they would be suing individual Linux users. To date, there has been no proof of SCO's claims of copied
code in Linux.
IBM/Motorola:
By early 1993, IBM had completed the development of a full line of PowerPC based desktops but
had to wait since Microsoft’s Windows NT was still months away from first release. Accordingly, and
further because IBM had developed animosity toward Microsoft, IBM decided to rewrite OS/2 for the
PowerPC. It took IBM two years to rewrite OS/2 for PowerPC, and by the time the operating system was
ready, the market for OS/2 on PowerPC had evaporated.
Apple continued work on a new line of Macintosh computers based on the PowerPC, and
eventually released the 601-based Power Macintosh in March 1994. Apple continues to successfully use
the PowerPC to this day in all their servers, desktops and laptops -- their machine designations tied to the
successive generations of the PowerPC architecture (G3, G4, G5 with G for “generation”).
The IBM/Apple Taligent operating system joint venture continued on. As time went by, priorities
shifted and the project focus changed from operating systems to “rapid application development”. The
Taligent OS became a layer that could sit on top of any modern operating system and provide numerous
services to applications software, thereby shortening the development cycle. Early in 1994, HewlettPackard, which had been doing its own work with object-oriented technology, made the decision to become
11
Intel and the RISC Wars
a Taligent partner. After the tragic death of its CEO in late 1995 Taligent faced a reduction in force and in
the spring of 1996, Taligent became a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM. In 1998, the company was
formally dissolved with the engineering teams becoming IBM employees.
Motorola had become less reliant on the microprocessor business as they began to focus on the
production of cellular phones. In 2003 they announced they would spin off their semiconductor product
sector as Freescale, which began publicly trading in July 2004. In addition, Motorola was unable to keep
pace with IBM’s performance on the PowerPC architecture and in 2003, Apple turned to IBM to provide
PowerPC chips for its new G5 desktop computers.
Sun/SPARC:
With annual revenues exceeding $11B, Sun continued to prosper as the largest supplier of
engineering workstations in the market although financial results have suffered of late. SPARC remains the
architecture used in nearly all Sun workstations to this day. Development continued as SPARC family
grew to include SuperSPARC (1992), SPARClite (1992) for laptops and UltraSPARC (1995).
The market for SPARC clones never really developed beyond the curiosity stage as Sun undercut
pricing for any potentially large purchases. Also, while Sun promoted the concept of cloning Sun
workstations with SPARC International, it failed as an "open standard" because Sun retained grant-back
rights to any architectural or implementation improvements, eliminating the incentive for companies to
invest efforts to differentiate themselves. One by one, the SPARC semiconductor partners lessened their
commitments to SPARC and Texas Instruments is currently the sole foundry for the processor family.
MIPS/SGI:
MIPS continued to sign additional semiconductor licenses through the first part of 1991 but had
largely saturated the market as the total number of licensees approached 10. These high-margin licensing
deals had sustained the company while it attempted to build system sales. In the second half of 1991, the
company began to sustain losses, which shook investor and customer confidence.
Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) was one of MIPS' largest customers. The company designed and built
high-performance three-dimensional graphics computers – for uses including the development of films
such as Jurassic Park. As MIPS began to weaken, SGI became worried that it may not be able to depend on
MIPS as a critical supplier of intellectual property for its line of workstations.
In March 1992, MIPS and SGI announced a merger valued at about $400 million. MIPS sales
continued to fall as customers questioned whether the company, after the merger, would continue to be an
industry-neutral chip and software supplier. After the announcement, MIPS reported disappointing firstquarter earnings and its stock price fell sharply. Partly to reflect MIPS's poor performance in the first
quarter and the dissolution of ACE, SGI and MIPS renegotiated the terms of the merger. In the end, SGI
bought MIPS for about $200 million, half the value of the original deal.
In 1999, newly appointed SGI CEO Rick Belluzzo believed that the proprietary hardware offered
less of a competitive advantage and de-emphasized MIPS in favor of Intel-based platforms. SGI organized
MIPS as a wholly owned subsidiary called MIPS Technologies Inc. (MTI). After a change in management
in the mid-1990s combined with a decision to migrate to the Intel Itanium architecture, SGI decided to spin
out MTI as a vendor of embedded microprocessors. MTI had an initial public offering on June 30, 1998. In
2000, SGI divested all its interest as stock dividend to its stockholders. Belluzzo left SGI in February 2001
to become the COO of Microsoft.
Today, MIPS Technology, Inc is a profitable public company that licenses the Intellectual
Property (IP) for it’s 32-bit and 64-bit microprocessor designs to be used as “cores” in chips for a wide
variety for electronic systems. MIPS-based chips are used in applications raging from digital set-top boxes,
12
Intel and the RISC Wars
digital televisions, DVD recorders, digital cameras, laser printers, network routers as well as the Sony
PlayStation and Nintendo 64 game consoles.
MIPS Semiconductor Suppliers:
Because of the collapse of the ACE consortium as well as the purchase of MIPS by SGI, chip
suppliers started losing interest in continuing to follow MIPS mainstream implementation path for the
architecture as a mainstream CPU. Since they had rights to the underlying MIPS architecture, each vendor
was free to choose their own path to optimize revenues and strategic position. Including NEC designing
their own private versions for themselves and for semiconductor customer Nintendo, IDT and LSI Logic
designing versions for the controller market and LSI Logic creating an ASIC cell for customer designs.
Performance Semiconductor rapidly disappeared from the market.
The semiconductor alliance partners each began to seek their own destiny. Siemens, Performance
Semiconductor and BIT dropped the MIPS line. IDT began to make low cost versions for embedded
applications such as laser printers. LSI Logic created a version of the MIPS R3000 in its ASIC cell library
as well as customized versions for laser printers, network controllers, graphics terminals and others. NEC
was able to leverage their memory business and become the primary semiconductor source for SGI.
DEC/Compaq:
In 1992, DEC abandoned their MIPS-based workstation line in favor of machines designed around
their internal RISC project, code-named Alpha. Despite the fact that DEC’s Alpha generally outperformed
most other RISC processors, Digital was never able to recapture the market share or profits it enjoyed with
the VAX line of minicomputers. In May 1997 DEC sued Intel for allegedly infringing on its Alpha patents
in designing the Pentium chips. The case settlement resulted in DEC's chip business being sold to Intel and
its networking business being sold to Cabletron.
In January 1998, Compaq purchased DEC for $9.6 billion, valued largely for its service business.
At the time, this was the largest computer industry acquisition. Compaq, which also purchased Tandem,
was only marginally successful at integrating and leveraging these new assets. Hewlett-Packard purchased
Compaq for $20 billion after an extended shareholder battle that ended in May 2001.
13
Intel and the RISC Wars
Appendix: FUD
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) is a marketing technique used by companies with a large
market share and used when a competitor brings a product to market such that the incumbent product is no
longer competitive. The entrenched player whose market position is threatened then resorts to
disinformation as a competitive weapon.
IBM was the first to practice FUD on a large scale. Gene Amdahl defined the term after he left
IBM in 1970 to start Amdahl Corporation, a company whose stated mission was to compete with in the
entrenched IBM mainframe market with compatible machines that ran faster and cost less:
"FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential
customers who might be considering Amdahl products. The idea, of course, was to persuade buyers to go
with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally
accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark
Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software."
By spreading questionable information about the drawbacks of less well-known products, an
established company can discourage decision-makers from choosing those products over its wares,
regardless of the relative technical merits. This is a recognized phenomenon, epitomized by the traditional
axiom of purchasing agents that "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" equipment. The result is that many
lower and middle level decision managers recommend products that they know to be technically inferior
because upper management is more likely to recognize the brand and therefore be deemed less risky.
FUD implementation comes in two phases: First, is a campaign of scare-mongering via 'gossip
channels' intended to cast a shadow of doubt over the competitors offerings and make customers think
twice before using it. Second, is to approach each customer and reassure them that the status quo is safe and
to pre-announce a ‘next generation’ capability intended to trump the new announced competitive offering.
FUD can be used to offhandedly 'smear' criticism or legitimate debate, even in cases where the
allegations are without merit or are merely implied; this tactic is often used in cases where the initial
publicity surrounding claims of FUD is likely to vastly overshadow any subsequent retraction. Such an
arbitrary usage is a general type of logical fallacy known as Ad hominem circumstantial. Opponents claim
that the practice of spreading of fear, uncertainty, and doubt is an unethical marketing technique that large
corporations consciously employ.
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Intel and the RISC Wars
RISC Camps:
Architecture
MIPS
(ACE Consortium)
Motorola 88000
HP PA-RISC
IBM PowerPC
Sun SPARC
(SPARC International)
Semiconductor
Suppliers
Bipolar Integrated Technologies (BIT)
IDT
LSI Logic
NEC
Performance Semiconductor
Siemens
Toshiba
Motorola
Hitachi, Samsung
IBM
Motorola
Cypress Semiconductor
Fujitsu
LSI Logic
Ross International
Texas Instruments
System
Adoptees
Acer, Compaq, Control Data,
Digital Equipment (DEC),
Kubota, MIPS, NEC, NKK,
Olivetti, Prime, Pyramid,
Siemens, Nixdorf, Silicon
Graphics (SGI), Sony,
Sumitomo, Tandem, Wang,
Zenith Data Systems
Data General
HP
IBM
Apple
Sun plus: Force Computers,
Fujitsu, Force Computers,
Fujitsu, Solbourne, Tadpole,
Tatung, Toshiba
Relative Stock Prices: (Note: Use 1988 to 1992)
15
Intel and the RISC Wars
Selected Microprocessor and Operating System Introductions: 1971 to 1999
Year
Intel
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
4004
8008
8080
1984
1985
1986
Other Processors
(RISC in BOLD)
Microsoft
AT&T: UNIX
Motorola: 6800
Digital Research: CP/M
IBM: Starts 801
8085
Motorola: 6809
8086
8088
80186
80188
80286
BSD Unix
Motorola: 68000
Motorola: 68008
Berkeley:
Berkeley:
Motorola:
Stanford:
Motorola:
RISC I
RISC II
68010
MIPS
68020
80386
Stanford: MIPS-X
MIPS: R2000
IBM: ROMP
Motorola: 68030
Sun: SPARC
AMD: 29000
Motorola: 88000
MIPS: R3000
1987
1988
1989
80486
i860
MIPS: R6000
HP: PA-RISC
1990
i960
1991
“Intel Inside”
AMD: 29050
IBM: RS/6000
MIPS: R4000
Xenix
MS DOS 1.0
1992
1993
Pentium
1994
1995
Pentium Pro
16
DEC: Alpha
MIPS: R4400
Sun: SuperSPARC
Sun: MicroSPARC
IBM: PowerPC 601
MIPS: R8000
IBM: PowerPC 604e
MIPS: R10000
Sun: UltraSPARC
DEC: VAX/VMS
Apollo: Aegis
AT&T: System V UNIX
MS DOS 2.0
MS DOS 3.0
Windows 1.0
Free Software Foundation
OS/2
IBM: OS/2
Microsoft hires DEC
architect Dave
Cutler to start OS/2
3.0
AT&T buys 20% of Sun.
Forms Unix International.
IBM, DEC, HP, Apollo: OSF
Sun: Sun OS
Next: NextStep
AT&T: Unix SVR4
Digital Research: DR-DOS
Windows 3.1
MS DOS 5.0
Windows NT
demonstrated
1996
1997
1998
1999
Other Operating Systems
Sun: Solaris
DEC: Open VMS
ACE formed
Linux first released
MIPS and SGI merge
ACE collapses
MS DOS 6.0
Windows NT ships
Windows 95
Windows NT 4.0
Pentium MMX
IBM: PowerPC G3
IBM: PowerPC G4
Windows 98
Windows NT 5.0
(Win 2000)
Apple: OSX server
Intel and the RISC Wars
Sources:
Chow, Paul. “The MIPS-X RISC Microprocessor” Kluwer Academic Publishers 1989
Liu, Juliana. “Hennessy's technological experience at MIPS link Stanford to Silicon Valley” Stanford Daily 4/26/ 2000
Masanell, Yoffie, David B., Mattu “Intel Corporation: 1968 – 2003”. 2002 Case Study, Harvard Business School.
Microsoft Corp “A Brief History of the Windows NT Operating System”. Fact Sheet. October 1998
Russinovich, Mark. “Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story” Windows IT Pro Magazine, December 1998
Yoffie, David B. “Strategic Management in Information Technology”. Harvard Business School Prentice Hall, 1994
Websites:
Every, David K. History of ACE - Alternatives to the PC - 1999
http://www.mackido.com/History/HistoryOfAce.html
BYTE June 91
http://www.byte.com/art/9606/sec5/art1.htm
MIPS Alliance on UNIX servers
http://febcm.club.fr/english/mips_alliance.htm
What is FUD?
http://www.cavcomp.demon.co.uk/halloween/fuddef.html
Wikipedia: FUD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUD
History of OS2 Warp:
http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2Warp.html
17