In a recent article on The Chip Letter [Babbage] looks at the Intel iAPX 432 computer architecture. This was an ambitious, hyper-CISC architecture that was Intel’s first 32-bit architecture. … ...

But one of the downsides to CISC architecture is that it relies on hardware, specifically the transistors, for storing complex instructions. That means the chip itself is usually much larger than ...

For example, the IBM PowerPC (a RISC architecture) has an ISA of a similar size to the IBM System 370 (a CISC architecture). Meanwhile, the DEC PDP-8 (a CISC architecture) only has 8 instructions.

Remarkably, the i960 as a solid RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture has its roots in Intel’s ill-fated extreme CISC architecture, the iAPX 432.

MUNICH, Germany — For embedded applications in office automation, consumer electronics and industrial systems, Renesas has developed a new 32-bit microcontroller family. Now the company provided first ...

“RISC architecture is gonna change everything.” Those absurdly geeky, incredibly prophetic words were spoken 30 years ago. Today, they’re somehow truer than ever.

First and foremost, x86 is an extremely powerful architecture. x86 processors are based on the Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) architecture, which includes a larger set of more complex ...

A CISC architecture can encode much more detail into a single instruction which can greatly improve performance. For example, a RISC architecture might just have one or two "Add" instructions ...

CISC to RISC and RISC to RISC. The ARM-based M series is a RISC design rather than Intel's x86 CISC architecture. RISC circuits use less complex instructions, ...