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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

At WWDC, Apple announced a radical change to its computers. The company is dropping Intel as its CPU provider, and will be transitioning its laptops and desktops to custom Apple-designed chips over ...

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 ...

MIPS Technologies released details this week of the latest incarnation of the architecture that defined RISC at a time when the rest of the industry was fully engaged in CISC architecture processors.

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 ...

When it comes to personal computing, most of the growth today is in the mobile market, not traditional desktop PCs and laptops. You could say that the PC concept is morphing to include next-generation ...

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 ...