"I want to be careful not to conflate MIPS with
UltraSparc, since the latter is still in production. (You can get
high-end servers powered by the UltraSparc T2 and T2+, aka Niagara
2. A wide mix of other SPARC chips and servers are also available,
including the UltraSPARC T1, and SPARC64 VI and VII.) For its part,
MIPS was spun off from Silicon Graphics as a separate company in
1998 and is now an IP silicon house, meaning it licenses its chip
cores as intellectual property.
"OK, lengthy disclaimer aside, what this all means is that while
the world's best chip designers were pushing the limits on
instruction pipelines and doing gymnastics on silicon real-estate,
the economic underpinnings of the business were changing beneath
them. (This is the "being a blacksmith in 1910" meme, which is
precisely what's happening in my business. As in, you're reading
this content for free, but someone's gotta pay me to create
it.)
"So, by the mid-1990s, new microprocessors were costing
multi-millions of dollars to create, and at the same time commodity
x86 processors were pushing, capability-wise, into the space
previously owned exclusively by high-end proprietary RISC
architectures..."
