itpro:

Stop f****** "American" supremacy and racism around the globe. China is bad. China is at fault. China this, China that. We are tech enthusiasts regardless of origin and place of development. Also stop that Chinese "spying" thing. Russians and Americans are veterans in these. Chill out.

bobblunderton:

You know this, obviously most others did not/do not. I will try and explain it for the rest of the folks here who may not know, how it was explained to me many many years ago. RISC computing is good for math and simple things like engine management or simple file management duties of a NAS, or even simple phone duties (be it a central phone server for an office or the cell phone many people hold in their hand). This requires much less transistors, less power = less heat output. CISC is good for multimedia, gaming, and so-forth. The complex instruction set is good for making short work of complex multimedia that most RISC processors would need many cycles to 'break down' and process. This being very complex, requiring millions of transistors, many complex instruction sets on-top of typical x86 / 64 instruction sets, but the more instructions = the more you can do with less processor cycles. For some duties, a RISC processor is inherently better; but if you watch movies or play lots of current-gen / last-gen games, CISC is the answer by leaps and bounds. So if you want to play the latest quarterly iteration of Call of Doodey, Cattlefield, or Couch-Fort Night, you'll want an x86/64 CISC CPU or APU processor. If you want to run your power grid, corporate / regional phone system, file server, industrial robot, or even a calculator/smart home thermostat or IOT devices, a RISC CPU is almost always better by a long-shot. I hope that helps explain some of it a little better, but I'm no field expert by a long shot (though I got my certs circa 1999~2000, and have worked a wide variety of fields).

Fender178:

It is impressive. Makes me wonder what Apple can do with their version of ARM chips for their PCs and see if they can out perform what they are currently using in their high end laptops.

Valken:

We already know the major gaming engines are being optimized for the ARM architecture and Apple pushing this front is going to get the major PC MB makers to jump on board sooner or later.

sykozis:

Apple tried pushing RISC in the past. Outside of the smartphone and tablet market, Apple is mostly ignored.

Gomez Addams:

Those are gross generalizations that have little if any fact behind them. They might have been true twenty years ago but there is zero evidence of it being true today. The best example to look at is your phone. It handles multimedia and games just fine in a hand-held, battery-powered unit that is certainly not a CISC processor.

Gomez Addams:

There is no inherent performance advantage today for either approach.

Tyrchlis:

To be fair, almost every modern x86/x86-64 CPU is a CISC/RISC hybrid with CISC I/0 converting processed data into micro ops that are very much RISC-like. That has been the case since AMD bought NexGen and released K6. Cyrix made a go of that and made a mess of it. Intel eventually picked up the trick too and has done as well as AMD with the concept ever since. There really are no pure CISC processors anymore. There are, however, pure RISC designs still, but really are of very niche focus other than ARM (Advanced RISC Machine). Edit - keep in mind that modern, long pipeline processors with SMT really HAVE to be RISC style micro-ops or the pipelines would be too complex for high clocks.

itpro:

You bring me memories. All those kids that have an IT job and payroll believe they know about processors. I envy their blessed ignorance.