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The x86 instruction set architecture (ISA), used today in more than 90 percent of the world's PCs and servers, hit the marketplace in 1978 as part of Intel's 8086 chip.
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Other instruction sets--which are basically, lists of operations that a software program can use--do exist, of course. There's IBM's Power, Sun Microsystems' Sparc and Intel's own EPIC (explicitly parallel instruction computing) Itanium project, to name a few. But x86 continues to thrive and has no serious competitors on the horizon because it provides "good enough" performance and because of the vast amount of software written over nearly three decades.
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Intel and AMD have managed to keep x86 fresh by continually adding extensions to the ISA, such as Intel's MMX and SSE instructions in the mid-'90s that improved graphics performance, and AMD's 64-bit extensions this decade that helped bypass the register issue. "We have seen a huge amount of change at the instruction level; we just keep calling it the same thing," said Rick Rashid, a senior vice president at Microsoft in charge of that company's research division.
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"There's no reason whatsoever why the Intel architecture remains so complex," said Simon Crosby, chief technology officer at virtualization software start-up XenSource. "There's no reason why they couldn't ditch 60 percent of the transistors on the chip, most of which are for legacy modes."
I totally agree!