IMO RISC vs CISC died as years ago the CISC guys started translating instructions into sequences of simpler ones and used pipelining and caches to eliminate any advantage of RISC. Then they went into hyperdrive with hardware and compiler smarts so something like a Zen 5 chip is in a different galaxy from all but a very few ARMs and those have kept up via optimizations that are mostly ISA agnostic. In simple terms once fetch and decode are done the layers below are similar.
On the other hand, in the earlier days there certainly was a contrast. Intel didn't slurp up and bury DEC Alpha for no reason! Pete Aug 16, 2026 6:25:50 PM Mike Lisanke <[email protected]>: > Pete, On the surface this appears to be pot-shots at RISC in-general. What > many (including me) didn't know is, RISC > has become a significant alternative to CISC. Why? Because orthogonal > register usage makes a lot of sense And > that Addressing modes solve A lot of problems. I was surprises at how Complex > the Reduced Instruction Set Computing > had become and the degree that ISC was a big topic in the computing industry. > I know that MIPS and other specs tell > us RISC doesn't compete well But that hasn't stopped all the small and big > low-power specialized processors from being > RISC... you posted a longish document so I've only scanned it at this point. > But it'd be interesting to banter about RISC v > CISC at some point. > > On Sun, Aug 16, 2026 at 6:09 PM Pete Soper via TriEmbed > <[email protected]> wrote: >> Here is a critique of RISCV that makes a number of points: some objective >> and some subjective: >> >> https://dmitry.gr/?r=06.%20Thoughts&proj=12.%20RV >> >> >> Here is a rebuttal challenging some of the points above and filling in major >> blanks. This is from someone with a great deal of embedded experience who >> lives in an economically challenged location. IMO this blurb makes it much >> easier to see the far reaching advantages of RISCV: >> https://rvembedded.com/blog_post/12/ >> >> Pete >> _______________________________________________ >> Triangle, NC Embedded Interest Group mailing list >> >> To post message: [email protected] >> List info: http://mail.triembed.org/mailman/listinfo/triembed_triembed.org >> TriEmbed web site: https://TriEmbed.org >> To unsubscribe, click link and send a blank message: >> mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe >> Searchable email archive available at >> https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ >> > > > -- > Best regards, Mike
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