All CPUs have some sort of Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), and whether it’s x86, ARM, SPARC, Power, or Alpha. Different ISAs can are faster at some tasks, and slower at others.

These binary sequences form the chip’s fundamental vocabulary, known as the computer’s instruction set. For years, the chip industry has relied on a variety of proprietary instruction sets.

The FFmpeg team recently announced a massive speed increase thanks to some newly patched code. The open-source project is now ...

This isn’t the first time we’ve read about a one-instruction set computer. Years ago, we saw a hardware version of a subtract and branch if negative computer.

Arm is RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) based, while x86 is CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing). Arm’s CPU instructions are reasonably atomic, with a very close correlation between ...

Intel's own Xeon Phi has focused on improving vector performance by implementing large, specialized vector processors (VPUs) in hardware and with support for Intel's AVX-512 instruction set (this ...

Software controls Intel x86 chips with the older CISC, or complex instruction set computing, technology, but deeper down, even Intel chips use RISC technology. Also on Thursday, ...

[Part 1 begins a look at the future of computing and, in particular, what happens when multicore processing “hits the Memory Wall.” Part 2 turns its attention to the “Power Wall” – the increasing heat ...

If you wanted to make a CPU, there are two obvious choices: ARM and RISC-V. But what are the differences between the two, and is one better than the other?

Although the early days of computing saw a lot of exotic and long-forgotten inventions, the architecture of LEO, which marked its 60th anniversary on Thursday, is remarkable for its normality.