In the early 1990s, each passing year seemed to bring a new CPU architecture. Exotic chips such as Hobbit, PA-RISC, MIPS, Sparc, PowerPC and Alpha were all ready to steal the crown from Intel’s x86 architecture, taking over the desktop one machine at a time.
Of course, it never happened. Unix workstations did deploy a range of powerful 64-bit reduced instruction set (RISC) CPU designs, but they remained firmly stuck at the extreme high-end of computing, with only PowerPC, co-designed by Apple, IBM and Motorola, ever remotely troubling the desktop market.