Intel Corp (INTC)

[Ideal_Inv]

RISC vs CISC: What's the Difference?
Analysis of ARM, X86, MIPS designs shows no difference

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 software developers out there who still think that instruction set architectures, reduced (RISC) or complex (CISC), have any significant effect on the power, energy or performance of your processor-based designs, forget it.

Ain't true. What is more important is the processor microarchitecture — the way those instructions are hardwired into the processor and what has been added to help them achieve a specific goal.

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"Based on this study, developers can safely consider ARM, MIPS, and x86 processors simply as engineering design points optimized for different levels of performance," he said. “There's nothing fundamentally more energy-efficient in one ISA class versus another."

In the concluding paragraph of the report, the authors write: "It appears that decades of hardware and compiler research has enabled efficient handling of both RISC and CISC ISAs, and both are equally positioned for the coming years of energy-constrained innovation."

http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327016