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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

Back in 1998, when I first began covering hardware at the newly launched Ars Technica, much of my writing focused on issues raised by the raging Mac vs. PC flame wars that took place in computing ...

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 ...

A technical paper titled “Energy-Efficient Exposed Datapath Architecture With a RISC-V Instruction Set Mode” was published by researchers at Tampere University. “Transport triggered architectures ...

Today, if you want to build a high-performance computing device, you can almost certainly find all the software you need in a free and open form. The same is not true for the processor chips that run ...