Reading this article made me curious about previous RISC approaches and what factored into their eventual demise. As much as everyone hates the X86/X64 instruction set, some have been predicting it would lose to RISC for more than 30 years, with some of the RISC dragon-slayers including:

IBM RT

Sparc

Mips

i960

PowerPC

DEC Alpha

ARM

RISC-V

Notable Non-RISC entries include:

Itanium/Itanium2

In the end, X86/X64 just kept on rolling, although one should not assume that the past outcomes will equal future outcomes. I would say that ARM has the best chance of dethroning X86/X64, though RISC-V just might be the future. Regardless, I would be curious to understand the past "failed" RISC approaches to see why exactly they're no-longer used and if there are any worthy ideas that a CPU designer might salvage from those attempts.

I searched Youtube and found a link by a channel called "Bits Inside by Rene Rebe", and I plan to watch it over lunch (I don't want to post a link on your Medium space, but it's easily findable).

In any case, thanks again for the article.