Comment by gruez

Comment by gruez 2 days ago

3 replies

It's basically the eternal debate of RISC vs CISC (x86). RISC proponents claim RISC is better because it's simpler to decode. CISC proponents retort that CISC means code can be more compact, which helps with cache hits.

bluGill 2 days ago

In the real world there is no CISC or RISC anymore. RISC is always extended to some new feature and suddenly becomes more complex. Meanwhile CISC is just a decoder over a RISC processor. Either way you get the best of both worlds: simple hardware (the RISC internals and CSIC instructions that do what you need.

Don't get too carried away in the above, x86 is still a lot more complex than ARM or RISC-V. However the complexity is only a tiny part of a CPU and so it doesn't matter.

  • snvzz 2 days ago

    You seem to be confusing ISA and microarchitecture.

    Modern ISAs try really hard to be independent from microarchitecture.

snvzz 2 days ago

>CISC proponents retort that CISC means code can be more compact,

RISC-V has the most compact code on 64bit, with margin to boot.

On 32bit, it used to be behind Thumb2, but it's the best as of the bit manipulation and extra compressed extensions circa 2021.