A couple of years ago, Erik McClure (a Microsoft software developer, at the time) published a blog entitled RISC Is Fundamentally Unscalable. This blog was really quite interesting and made some very ...

RISC-V is, like x86 and ARM, an instruction set architecture (ISA). Unlike x86 and ARM, it is a free and open standard that anyone can use without getting locked into someone else's processor designs ...

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 ...

Welcome to Upscaled, our explainer show where we dig into the bits of tech that make your gadgets faster. Today, I want to talk about instruction set architectures. Apple announced it's building its ...

RISC is a somewhat misleading term, as a RISC processor doesn't *have* to have fewer instructions in its ISA than a CISC system (Though RISC architectures do tend to try to do so). For example, the ...

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 ...