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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A new instruction set by the original creator of MIPS aims to reinvent the ultra-low power, high-efficiency processor -- and to do so with an architecture that's fundamentally open and available to ...

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 ...

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 ...

Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is a set of instructions defined for the processor’s architecture. These are the instructions that the processor understands. It defines the hardware and software ...

In a world of RISC processors, QuickLogic created a CISC co-processor for its EOS multi-core sensor hub chip to save power in wearables. The co-processing core is called the ‘flexible fusion engine’ ...

Renesas Electronics has increased the performance of its RX processor core, with a 4.0 Coremark MHz or 2.0 DMIPS/MHz RXv2 core. The CISC microcontroller now has the DSP performance to execute complex ...