RISC Vs. CISC In Mobile Computing

eldavojohn writes "For the processor geeks here, Jon Stokes has a thoughtful article up at Ars Technica analyzing RISC vs. CISC in mobile phones (Wikipedia on Reduced Instruction Set Computers and Complex Instruction Set Computers). He wraps it up with two questions: 'How much is the legacy x86 code base really worth for mobile and ultramobile devices? The consensus seems to be "not much," and I vacillate on this question quite a bit. This question merits an entire article of its own, though,' and 'Will Intel retain its process leadership vs. foundries like TSMC, which are rapidly catching up to it in their timetables for process transitions? ARM, MIPS, and other players in the mobile device space that I haven't mentioned, like NVIDIA, AMD/ATI, VIA, and PowerVR, all depend on these foundries to get their chips to market, so being one process node behind hurts them. But if these RISC and mobile graphics products can compete with Intel's offerings on feature size, then that will neutralize Intel's considerable process advantage.'"

Comments

Re:CISC is dead

[RecessionCone]

Actually, have you heard of micro-op and macro-op fusion? Intel is touting them as a big plus for their Core microarchitecture: basically, they take RISC internal instructions and fuse them into CISC internal instructions (micro-op fusion) and also take sets of CISC external instructions and fuse them into CISC internal instructions (macro-op fusion).

So basically, things are so much more complicated these days that you can't even call x86 chips RISC CPUs with CISC instruction sets.

We're in a post-RISC era.