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 ...

Remember how I said that Moore's Law is "the full-employment act for computer pundits"? In the smaller niche of microprocessor journalism, there used to be another topic that was always good for a ...

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 ...

I was just wanting to know if anyone can tell me if the new athlon mp and xp's are risc chips or if they went to cisc. I know the older AMD chips were all RISC, but not sure of the newer ones. When ...

A computer processor uses a so-called Instruction Set Architecture to talk with the world outside of its own circuitry. This ISA consists of a number of instructions, which essentially define the ...

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 ...