RISC vs. CISC was the Flame war of the late 80s
From Slashdot | RISC Vs. CISC In Mobile Computing
Completely pointless (Score:5, Interesting)
by El Cabri (13930) * on Monday May 19, @08:06PM (#23469122)
Journal
RISC vs CISC was the architecture flamewar of the late 1980s. Welcome to the 21th century, you’ll like it here. It’s a world when, since the late 90s, the ISA (instruction set architecture), is so abstracted away from the actual micro-architecture of microprocessor, as to make it completely pointless to make distinctions between the two. Modern processors are RISC, they are CISC, they are vector machines, they’re everything you want them to be. Move on, the modern problems are now in multi-core architecture and their issues of memory coherence, cache sharing, memory bandwidth, interlocking mechanisms, uniform vs non-uniform, etc. The “pure RISC” standard bearers of yore have disappeared or have been expelled from the personnal computing sphere (remember Apple ditching PowerPC ? Alpha anyone ? Where are those shiny MIPS-based SGIs gone?). Even Intel couldn’t impose a new ISA on its own (poor adoption of IA-64). The only RISC ISA that has any existence in the personnal computing arena, including mobile, is ARM, but precisely, they do only mobile. There’s really no reason at all to build any device on which you plan to run generic OSes and rich computing experience on anything else than x86 or x86-64 machines.
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