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 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 ...

The Mac's best quality: software A Pioneer Press piece opines that the best part of the Macintosh platform is elegant, well-designed software. "So what does Macintosh have going for it? The most ...

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 International, the global open hardware standards organization, has announced that Intel has joined RISC-V at the Premier membership level. Let that sink in for a minute. Intel, which has made ...

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 ...

For any Ars Technica readers who've been with us since 1998 and who fondly recall the "RISC vs. CISC" wars of yesteryear, I've got great news: the battle is back on. Here's a look at the new state of ...

There are a ton of inventions out in the world that are almost complete accidents, but are still ubiquitous in our day-to-day lives. Things like bubble wrap which was originally intended to be ...

In my first blog, we examined gave the historical context of the instruction set battles of ARM and x86, covering the RISC-CISC Wars in the PrePC Era and the PC Era. This blog covers Round 3, the ...