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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The microcontroller sector is evolving in an exciting direction by providing designers with a growing menu of choices tailored to their performance and power requirements. Unlike the classic 1990s ...

The Android operating system is built to run on three different types of processor architecture: Arm, Intel x86, and MIPS. The former is today’s ubiquitous architecture after Intel abandoned its ...

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 ...

An Apple job ad reveals that the company is exploring the use of RISC-V chips, an open-source processor tech that competes with the ARM architecture used for Apple’s A-series and M-series chips.