• GaveUp [she/her]
    ·
    1 year ago

    RISC is simpler than x86 and thus more resource efficient at the cost of compute power

    And I don't fully understand why but x86 is kinda shit because of how bloated it is amongst other reasons and modern Intel x86 chips actually translate the x86 ISA to RISC internally within the chip

    • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      RISC architectures aren't necessarily more resource efficient or less computationally powerful than CISC architectures. The reason RISC architectures (or microarchitectures, in Intel's case) took over is because they allow certain optimizations (simpler pipelining, simpler functional units for more superscalar processors, smaller processor cores so you can fit more cores in a single package, etc) that allow faster and more parallel execution of instructions. Eventually, this ended up being faster than having more complicated instructions that did more in a single operation (like in the x86 architecture). Also, programs written (or compiled) for RISC architectures tend to require more memory just because each instruction accomplishes less than on a CISC architecture.