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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A decade ago, an idea was born in a laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley to create a lingua franca for computer chips, a set of instructions that would be used by all chipmakers and ...