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 ...

Remember how I said that Moore's Law is "the full-employment act for computer pundits"? In the smaller niche of microprocessor journalism, there used to be another topic that was always good for a ...

Ten years ago, I waded into the then-raging “Mac vs. PC” wars with a lengthy treatise on “RISC vs. CISC: the Post-RISC Era.” In the conclusion to that article, I declared the “RISC vs. CISC” debate ...

Many of the extremely complex instructions that are present in the x86 instruction set for legacy support have a huge cost to process, and can be computed faster with other instructions. Thus ...

Forecasting remarkable capabilities in code efficiency, processing performance, and power consumption, the company's design for a Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) CPU architecture will soon ...

Indeed, most processors today — RISC or CISC — are about three-quarters cache, with a little CPU core lurking in one corner of the chip. ARM can get away with slashing its transistor budget because it ...

As simple as a processor’s instruction set may seem, especially in a 1978-era one like the Intel 8086, there is quite a bit going on to go from something like a conditional jump instruction to a set ...

For months, Apple has been fighting a battle to convince folks that megahertz (MHz) isn’t the most important statistic in determining the speed of a computer. Apple hasn’t made much headway, but ...