The big sea change that AMD caused is that 64-bit processors are now a commodity. Intel COULD have done that without AMD, but I doubt that they WOULD have if AMD hadn't essentially forced their hand.

And it's so ironic that people who were not married to x86 architectures enjoyed 64-bit computing a full decade before it became mainstream (as in "you could order a box from Dell")...

And that Sun had one of the first full implementations (I think MIPS got there first).

I thought Intel invented the micro-op architecture with the Pentium Pro.

Yeah - although microcode had been around for a very long time.

The difference between microcode and RISC was the amount of synchronisation - RISC generally implied lots of uniform, high performance operations. Microcode could, but didn't necessarily. e.g. Microcode could still be doing funky co-ordination with lots of specialised execution units (and did afaik). This has some similarities to RISC, but RISC is a different philosophy really - namely fewer types, pipelined accesses, uniform instructions, more registers, etc.

(In my view) the big watershed moment was AMD's K5 architecture. This was literally based on one of AMD's pure RISC designs. It wasn't that popular in itself, but it set up a golden age for AMD... Which really only came to an end with Intel's Core.

Microcode is an implementation technique. Micro-ops (or whatever Intel formally calls them) is an instruction dispatch architecture --- an actual microarchitectural feature.

Just to be pedantic.

I thought that was all originally DEC Alpha IP.