CISC chips became more RISC-like, while RISC chips ramped up complexity, capabilities, and die size. A good example of this trend is the entire ARM vs. x86 debate.

Ultimately, however, they both won--CISC in software and RISC in hardware. The x86 architecture dominates the PC and server markets, but the guts of modern x86 chips are very RISC-like.

They offered the term "CISC" -- Complex Instruction Set Computer -- to describe many of the various CPU architectures already in existence that did not follow the tenets of RISC.

Unlike RISC architectures, the architecture works with variable-length instruction words. While instructions can have a length from one to nine bytes, the most frequently used instructions are ...

Do Apple's new Mac chips mean ARM has won? Apple is dropping Intel and the x86 architecture in favor of ARM and RISC.

A CISC program will typically use fewer instructions but each instruction will take more cycles. Reduced instruction set computer, or RISC, types have a smaller, optimized set of generalized, simple ...

With the runaway success of the new ARM-based M1 Macs, non-x86 architectures are getting their closeup. RISC-V is getting the most attention from system designers looking to horn-in on Apple's ...

For example, the IBM PowerPC (a RISC architecture) has an ISA of a similar size to the IBM System 370 (a CISC architecture). Meanwhile, the DEC PDP-8 (a CISC architecture) only has 8 instructions.

A couple of years ago, Erik McClure (a Microsoft software developer, at the time) published a blog entitled RISC Is Fundamentally Unscalable. This blog was really quite interesting and made some very ...