Why RISC vs. CISC Is the Wrong Way to Compare x86, ARM CPUs When Patterson and Ditzel coined RISC and CISC they intended to clarify two different strategies for CPU design.

The result is that RISC moves processing complexity up into the program. CISC does more on-chip; RISC does more in the program. For RISC, it means a larger program and more memory usage.

And if CISC won, then RISC was a useful idea whose time came and went, and some of its better ideas live on because Intel has adopted them for its x86 family.

Prompted by the chipmaker's announcement of the SSE5 instruction-set extensions, Glaskowsky analyzes the ultimate outcome to this old controversy.

But RISC self-contained chips use more streamlined instructions than CISC systems that have various math processors, voltage regulators, and memory controllers scattered across a mainboard.

What kind of performance advantages should we expect when Apple shifts to ARM over x86? Some of the articles online are framing this as a CISC-versus-RISC battle, but that's an outdated comparison.

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 ...