Advanced Computing Environment

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The Advanced Computing Environment (ACE) was defined by an industry consortium in the early 1990s to be the next generation commodity computing platform after DOS-based Personal Computers. The consortium was started in 1991 by Compaq, Microsoft, MIPS Computer Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation, and the Santa Cruz Operation. Other members of the consortium included Acer, Control Data Corporation, Kobuta, NEC Corporation, NKK, Olivetti, Prime Computer, Pyramid Technology, Siemens, Silicon Graphics, Sony, Sumitomo, Tandem, Wang Laboratories, and Zenith Data Systems. Besides these large companies, several start-up companies built ACE compliant systems as well.

The environment standardized on the MIPS architecture microprocessor family and two operating systems: SCO UNIX with Open Desktop and what would become Windows NT (originally named OS/2 3.0). The Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) document was produced to give hardware and firmware specifications for the platform.

The porting of the Microsoft operating system to other instruction set architectures created hope that other hardware plaforms could more effectively compete with Wintel PCs . The belief was that RISC based computers would deliver superior price-performance to that of the older platform. Eventually, Windows NT was also ported to the DEC Alpha and PowerPC processors as well.

Soon after the ACE initiative was announced, a competing initiative was formed, known as "The Apache Group" (no relation to the web server development team now known as the Apache Software Foundation). The name was chosen because it was felt that the ACE decision to support only little-endian architectures was short-sighted, so the new group promoted a big-endian ("BigIndian") alternative.

The ACE initiative (and consortium) fell apart within a few years as it became apparent that there was not a mass market for an alternative to the Wintel computing platform. The upstart platforms did not offer enough performance improvement from the incumbent PC and there were major cost disadvantages of such systems due to the low volume production. When the initiative started, RISC based systems (running at 100-200 MHz at the time) had substantial performance advantage over Intel 80486 and original Pentium chips (running at approximately 60 MHz at the time). Intel quickly migrated the Pentium design to newer semiconductor process generations and that performance (and operating frequency) advantage slipped away.

It may be that the consortium broke up due to internal rivalries and conflicting agendas:

MIPS got into financial difficulty and was purchased by SGI. Many systems companies don't wish to cooperate with a systems competitor.
DEC released their Alpha processor and were more interested in advancing Alpha than MIPS
Even though ACE supported x86 for a time, Intel was never a member
various reasons are given for Compaq's departure
SCO left claiming their future was x386

One of the first companies to leave the consortium was Compaq. The unsubstantiated rumor was that Intel threatened that company to not deliver sufficient quantities of processor chips to support Compaq's then current production rate.

The initiative was used by chip companies as an attempt to take market share away from Intel. System companies used the initiative as an attempt to take market share away from the workstation leader, Sun Microsystems.