Back to the Future!
In 1984, a small team of Sun engineers set out to develop a 32-bit RISC processor called SPARC (for Scalable Processor Architecture). The idea was to use the chips in Sun’s new line of workstations. One day, Scott McNealy, then Sun’s CEO, showed up at the SPARC development lab. “He said that SPARC would take Sun from a $500-million-a-year company to a billion-dollar-a-year company,” recalls Patterson, a consultant to the SPARC project.
...
The first version of the minimalist SPARC consisted of a “20,000-gate-array processor without even integer multiply/divide instructions,” says Robert Garner, the lead SPARC architect and now an IBM researcher. Yet, at 10 million instructions per second, it ran about three times as fast as the complex-instruction-set computer (CISC) processors of the day.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/chip-hall-of-fame-sun-microsystems-sparc-processor