Try to investigate the differences between the x86 and ARM processor families (or x86 and the Apple M1), and you'll see the acronyms CISC and RISC. It's a common way to frame the discussion, but not a ...

A new study comparing the Intel X86, the ARM and MIPS CPUs finds that microarchitecture is more important than instruction set architecture, RISC or CISC. If you are one of the few hardware or ...

Prompted by the chipmaker's announcement of the SSE5 instruction-set extensions, Glaskowsky analyzes the ultimate outcome to this old controversy. Peter N. Glaskowsky is a computer architect in ...

I was just wanting to know if anyone can tell me if the new athlon mp and xp's are risc chips or if they went to cisc. I know the older AMD chips were all RISC, but not sure of the newer ones. When ...

The Mac's best quality: software A Pioneer Press piece opines that the best part of the Macintosh platform is elegant, well-designed software. "So what does Macintosh have going for it? The most ...

One of the features of Ars Premier 2.0 is subscriber-only content such as live chats and articles. Tonight, we’re announcing our next Premier 2.0 feature, a retrospective on the past ten years of RISC ...

RISC vs. CISC wars raged in the 1980s when chip area and processor design complexity were the primary constraints and desktops and servers exclusively dominated the computing landscape. Today, energy ...

In my first blog, we examined gave the historical context of the instruction set battles of ARM and x86, covering the RISC-CISC Wars in the PrePC Era and the PC Era. This blog covers Round 3, the ...

SAN JOSE–Looking to alter the embedded chip landscape, startup MemoryLogix Inc. took the Microprocessor Forum last week to unveil the company and disclose the development of a “586-based ...

A computer processor uses a so-called Instruction Set Architecture to talk with the world outside of its own circuitry. This ISA consists of a number of instructions, which essentially define the ...