Nov. 10, 2025 –
By Jim McGregor, Contributor, for Tirias Research
Discussions about CPUs often frame one instruction set architecture (ISA) against another—x86 vs. Arm, Arm vs. RISC-V, and so on. However, it’s common to use multiple CPU architectures in a single system, whether that is a single system-on-chip (SoC) or a larger electronics platform, like a PC, car or even a data center. Throughout the history of the electronics industry, there has never been just one CPU architecture option because no two processing workloads are the same.
Tirias Research has consulted for AMD, Arm, Intel, MIPS, Qualcomm and other companies mentioned in this article.