Richard Bradbury's prediction is coming true, and it's not yet 2008.
Since Richard wrote that article in February, Intel's position has strengthened. They have licensed the StrongARM design, boosting their ailing embedded portfolio. Digital's Alpha is still under threat, despite protests to the contrary. Now it seems that MIPS' owners, Silicon Graphics, have surrendered too. MIPS - the only architecture free from Intel's influence that Richard could find.
Following almost a year of poor financial performance, Silicon Graphics have decided to make radical changes. It seems likely that the MIPS processor business will be split in two - Silicon Graphics retaining the high-performance side, whilst the embedded processor division will become a separate company. However, the workstation manufacturer does not have long-term plans for the designs it retains.
The company has already committed to using the "Slot 2" based Pentium 2 in a low-cost workstation to be released later this year. They have also decided to use the forthcoming Intel Merced, due in the early years of the next century. Now Silicon Graphics are to abandon completely their own processor architecture - two more versions of the MIPS R10000 processor are planned, the second to be released in 1999. After that, no more desktop processors will be produced, and the company will move entirely to the IA-64 platform. At the same time, it seems likely that Microsoft's Windows NT will replace UNIX as the recommended operating system.
So Richard Bradbury was right in his analysis - his only error was to underestimate the speed at which the other architectures will fade away. Hewlett Packard are collaborating with Intel to develop the Merced. Sun and Digital are trying to run with two processor architectures. Silicon Graphics has axed MIPS. Are there any competitors left?
64-bit horror story - Not such a bleak outlook
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