I find this swipe both absurd and unwarranted.

First, IBM/Sun/Moto did not "try a new ISA in an established market": rather their ISAs appeared at about the same time as x86 (keeping in mind that PPc is a successor of Power) and they just didn't catch on, that's all. In the lot only Alpha was a latecomer.

Second until recently the market for these chips was walled off and totally separate from the market for desktop chips, so the comparison makes no sense.

Third and lastly, even though the desktop and server chip market have now fused and the RISC chips are now feeling the heat there, too, Sparc, PPc and MIPS are still doing very well in the embedded market, so they are far from "dead bodies".

As for AMD having finally cracked open the Intel monopoly, maybe one reason why they are keeping quiet is that this isn't the first time they've had some success but it has usually been fleeting, as AMD has historically been plagued with execution problems. On the other hand some Intel chips have flopped before and Intel has recovered. So my opinion is that the fat lady hasn't sung on this yet.

Regards,

-- O.L.