Rounding up the state of play in the RISC market, Digital Equipment Corp’s Alpha and the MIPS Technologies Inc’s R4000 part are already 64-bit. IBM Corp is also making the transition along with Sun Microsystems Inc but its first 64-bit silicon, the 620 PowerPC, is still a year away. An essay in the latest issue of the Microprocessor Report makes the point that the designers that are pressing the clock speed argument such as MIPS, Hewlett-Packard Co and DEC are the ones winning the performance race, not those such as Sun, IBM and Motorola Inc that stress instructions per cycle. The complexity of the Sun, IBM and Motorola designs can also slow time-to-market: a six-month slip, such as Sun had with the SuperSparc, can make a new CPU suddenly uncompetitive.
