RISC vs CISC: What's the Difference?

Analysis of ARM, X86, MIPS designs shows no difference

Bernard Cole, Editor of the EE Times' Microcontroller and Printed Circuit Board Designlines
EETimes (6/30/2015 06:07 PM EDT)

A new study comparing the Intel X86, the ARM and MIPS CPUs finds that microarchitecture is more important than instruction set architecture, RISC or CISC.

If you are one of the few hardware or software developers out there who still think that instruction set architectures, reduced (RISC) or complex (CISC), have any significant effect on the power, energy or performance of your processor-based designs, forget it.

Ain't true. What is more important is the processor microarchitecture — the way those instructions are hardwired into the processor and what has been added to help them achieve a specific goal.

This is the over-arching conclusion of a study recently published in the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. In the paper, "ISA Wars: Understanding the Relevance of ISA being CISC or RISC," authors Emily Blem, Jakrishnan Menon, Thiruvengadam Vijayaraghavan, and Karthhikeyan Sankaralingam, report the results of a study over the last four years or so by the University of Wisconsin (Maidison) Vertical Research Group(VRG).

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