> but one source[0] does allude that it was a real possibility That doesn't really suggest an intention to replace. To me that seems more of a hope that x86 wo

> but one source[0] does allude that it was a real possibility That doesn't really suggest an intention to replace. To me that seems more of a hope that x86 would fade into irrelevance on its own, beaten down by superior RISC ISAs. -------------- It is interesting to consider what a transition away from x86 would have looked like. I think the best chance would have been something lead by Microsoft in the early 90s. The 386 version of Windows 3.0 was already virtualising both DOS and Win16 code into their own isolated VMs. If you added a translation layer for 16-bit x86 code to those VMs, then you could probably port windows to any host CPU arch. I think we are talking about a world where 486 class CPUs never arrived, or they preformed horribly and the pentium was canceled. But it's a small window. In 1990, it was very rare to see 32bit x86 code. 32-bit DOS extenders were only just starting to be a thing. Windows didn't support 32-bit userspace until 1993. The main 32-bit code anyone was running in 1990 was the windows 3.0 kernel itself. By 1992, it was common for DOS games to use DOS Extenders, and the transition would have required a 32-bit x86 translation layer too. These RISC PC compatibles would lost the ability to boot directly into real-mode DOS, but would have run DOS just fine inside a windows DOS VM. It should have been possible to get good hardware compatibility too. Windows 3.0 can already run DOS drivers inside a DOS VM, adding cpu translation shouldn't have caused issues. With motherboard support, it should have been possible to support most existing ISA/EISA/VLB cards.