In the early nineties, things were changing everywhere. The wall had just come down and half of Europe were encountering freedom for the first time in their lives. Metallica had found mainstream success. Hair metal died and everybody was expecting the x86 architecture that was still struggling to transition to 32-bit to be crushed by workstation class RISC architectures. Even Windows NT was available on PowerPC and MIPS R4000.

My late father, who was basically a contrarian in a workplace dominated by Novell Netware at this point and always loved UNIX and would subject his people to use MS Word for Xenix, which basically had an identical user experience to MS Word for DOS at the time. Over serial terminal of course. He would eventually accept Linux as a substitute. He was so hyped at this point about all the heavy hitter RISC architectures that were already in use in workstations as well as those under development and was reading up on all of them in the pop science computer magazines that existed back in the day.

Just a reminder, RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer, which instead of having a complex instruction set with specialised instructions for edge case situations, it has a limited set of operations but more registers – i.e. the only “memory” the processor can readily access, the actual RAM is miles away from a CPU perspective – and a highly optimised instruction pipeline. Sometimes the architecture is called load/store describing that the “reduced” in Reduced Instruction Set refers to that the amount of work done per instruction is reduced – the instructions separate memory access from arithmetic, each instruction doing either – not both. CISC instructions on the other hand can have instructions that access memory multiple times. A complex instruction set computer therefore has a harder time optimising the instruction pipeline, which we can see with the speculative execution data leaks in Intel recent history. The benefits of a sane instruction set in terms of raw speed and cache efficiency were obvious even back then – the only real hurdle was backward compatibility. Would the players involved become one with the zeitgeist and embrace the change?

We all know what happened. Metallica went too far and cut their hair and released two mediocre albums in quick successions. Tragedy struck the Cobain household. Nu metal was created. Apple did make the transition to PowerPC in partnership with IBM and Motorola, but Intel had introduced the Pentium processor, bringing all the 32-bits to the backwards compatibility party.

While MIPS was already 64-bit, Intel had enormous problems evolving their platform. Ironically it was AMD that first invented a working 64-bit architecture on top of x86 that intel then could license for mainstream use, at the cost of settling their perennial legal battles.

After this, the instruction set architecture wars were settled, and everything ossified, Intel created the Core series and took the performance crown back from AMD. There were annual incremental improvement but Intel basically rested comfortably on their laurels just stacking them peas.

After the Skylake architecture things came to a head. The Skylake launch was fraught with bugs, and the ambitious roadmap of future architecture developments has not been delivered on. The current Intel desktop architecture is essentially Skylake +++ but the promised move to a new process node has not happened. Rumours say that this was why Apple MacBook Pro is struggling with low performance and overheating. The processors those laptops were designed for never came, and the old ones run way too hot to viably fit in such tiny packaging.

So – switch to AMD Ryzen mobile APUs then? Well – yes, that would have been my suggestion. But Apple again are not afraid to make drastic changes. After claiming strong performance in their iPad Pro chips they fancy themselves ready to give the middle finger to both Intel and AMD, and just go it alone and produce desktop class CPUs, based on the Acorn RISC Machine architecture. Sign up and pay the $500 and you will – if approved – receive a loaner ARM machine in a MacMini case with 16Gb of RAM and 512Gb of SSD storage so you can test your new ARM desktop Mac apps. I think my father would have been pleased.