A historical approach to the debate by Hannibal Framing the Debate The majority of today's processors can't rightfully be called completely RISC or completely CISC. The two textbook architectures have evolved towards each other to such an extent that there's no longer a clear distinction between their respective approaches to increasing performance and efficiency. To be specific, chips that implement the x86 CISC ISA have come to look a lot like chips that implement various RISC ISA's; the instruction set architecture is the same, but under the hood it's a whole different ball game. But this hasn't been a one-way trend. Rather, the same goes for today's so-called RISC CPUs. They've added more instructions and more complexity to the point where they're every bit as complex as their CISC counterparts. Thus the "RISC vs. CISC" debate really exists only in the minds of marketing departments and platform advocates whose purpose in creating and perpetuating this fictitious conflict is to promote their pet product by means of name-calling and sloganeering.
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