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Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

I've wondered why MIPS didn't conquer the high and the low.

The difficulties of the instruction set might have had a hand.

https://www.jwhitham.org/2016/02/risc-instruction-sets-i-hav...

Broadly speaking I think the instruction set doesn't make much difference (assuming it rises above a baseline level of capability). What did for all the workstation and minicomputer class vendors with non-x86 architectures was that x86 got good enough and was much much cheaper because of the volume of the PC market. At the lower end the business model (sell your CPU core to go into other companies' SoCs) was a lot more important than the architecture in Arm's eventual success I think (and the rise of riscv is absolutely down to its business model too).

Some of the things listed in that article are definitely architecture design mistakes (especially the lack of interlocks in MIPS I), but they're not deal breakers and some of them are fixable (later MIPS versions put in the interlocks so you didn't need to care unless you were targeting the older CPUs). In the end not that many programmers write assembly or compilers.

Unsung heroes perhaps but don't underestimate the impact of Dell, ie "x86 getting good enough" was more than just about clock speed and branch prediction type stuff. Mass production of x86 servers killed Big Unix as much as advances in the chips.

After all, Unix on x86 was very widely deployed thanks to SCO, who had a lock on the retail POS and store backend type of IT, but who ran on PCs that were not what we would call servers today.

However once Dell mastered volume production of servers to similar build quality as the Sun SS20 pizza boxes at a fraction of the cost, they had the runway to build bigger and better servers and it was all over for Big Unix.

This isn't a Dell post, but they offered both Dell Unix and Solaris for a time, before Sun tried to fight them off with Cobalt rack servers. But it was too late.

You’re making me pretty nostalgic. I helped maintain a SCO “beefier than a desktop but cheaper than a server” server that ran a clothing factory’s serial terminals for years. And I had a Cobalt Cube :)

MIPS CPUs were showing up in consumer networking gear for quite some time. I was a little bit sad that I couldn't run Irix on one of my last routers given that it had a faster CPU and more memory than any Indy I ever owned.

The R3000 had a moment in the sun, it was used in everything from SGI and DEC workstations down to the Sony PlayStation.

Should've made it into a long-playing laptop, imho...

Go look at how much money different people had to do chip development in the 90s.

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