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At first, the industry was reluctant to switch to RISC. But the new crop of chips has made believers out of almost everybody. Sun, a company best known for its engineering computers, got into the chip business last summer when it began licensing a RISC processor to AT&T, Unisys and Xerox. MIPS, which introduced its second generation of the chips last month, supplies microprocessors to Tandem, Prime, and Silicon Graphics. Hewlett-Packard has built an entire line of computers around RISC technology.
Most important, IBM is making a major commitment to RISC. IBM Vice President Andrew Heller suggests that RISC technology could produce startling advances in electronic speech recognition, machine vision and artificial intelligence -- all of which require superfast microprocessors. Says Heller: "Computers that can listen and talk back, and recognize objects on sight, are not so farfetched. RISC will help make all that a reality, and it's going to happen this century."