A cheap CPU in a very expensive computer

In the mid-1990s, there were so many articles about how cheap all the RISC CPUs were compared to what Intel offered. You could read it in an every computer-related magazine every month. Scientist friends of mine at universities desperately wanted to have such RISC CPUs in their own personal computers. They never really liked x86 design and they were used to work on UNIX workstations, so they didn’t even need any support for running Windows. However, although these CPUs were marketed as inexpensive, it was nearly impossible to build a computer based on them. You could only buy a complete UNIX workstation or a hi-end workstation-class mainboard with a lot of unnecessary features. There was no way to buy a reasonably priced basic mainboard.

At least that was the situation here in Central Europe. What was your experience? Was it different in your country?

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1 thought on “A cheap CPU in a very expensive computer”

  1. It was all bollocks. Mass marketed cpus will always trounce everything else in price. And even if it was true, the rest of the RISC system with chipsets and peripheral hardware would remove any hypothetical advantage.

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