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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

RISC-V architecture is gaining traction in China as a geopolitically neutral alternative to x86 and ARM architectures dominated by the U.S. The rise of RISC-V presents a potential risk to Advanced ...

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 ...

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 ...

If you want to buy a new CPU for your desktop PC these days, you're pretty much limited to AMD or Intel processors. But four decades ago, the CPU market was quite different and far more diverse, with ...