Berkeley computer science professor and RISC pioneer Dave Patterson thinks RISC is due for a comeback though. In a recent blog posted on the ARM Holdings website, Patterson argues that the "PostPC" era will see a return to the simpler, more efficient designs of RISC architectures:
"The importance of maintaining the sequential programming model combined with the increasingly abundant number of transistors from Moore’s Law led, in my view, to wretched excess in computer design." he writes. "Measured by performance per transistor or by performance per watt, the designs of the late 1990s and early 2000s were some of the least efficient microprocessors ever built. This lavishness was acceptable for PCs, where binary compatibility was paramount and cost and battery life were less important, but performance was delivered more by brute force than by elegance."