Do you remember the 1990s everlasting arguments about RISC vs CISC? There were so many arguments (online and magazines) saying that "soon" RISC would eat CISC. And yet, it never happened. I'll be dead before the demise of x86. More likely: The computing landscape will get more complex. Probably ARM will become a legitimate competitor to x86 outside of handheld computing, and RISC V will become a legitimate competitor to ARM for single board and handheld computing.

> Probably ARM will become a legitimate competitor to x86 outside of handheld computing

Err..

Are Apple Silicon and Nvidia Vera and Amazon Graviton are considered illegitimate or non-competitors for some reason?

You are right! I didn't think about about Mac desktops. I was thinking that ARM is a second class citizen for Linux and Win32. X86 is still king there, but that will slowly change.

> ARM is a second class citizen for Linux and Win32.

Nvidia Vera and Amazon Graviton are both primarily Linux platforms.

I mean it did kinda happen. x86 is pretty much the only surviving CISC. Everything else that has come since 80s or 90s has been RISC.

arm is very much a cisc, arm iphones have instructions that correspond to speeding up JavaScript hot paths (FJCVTZS)

Also some GPU instructions are several times more complex than the most complex cisc instruction from the 90s.

I think you are confusing CISC with specialized instructions. We just ask 3 questions to decide if something is CISC or RISC. 1. Are the instructions 32 bit wide? 2. Can the instruction only operate on registers? 3. Does it use microcoded, multi-cycle state machines for basic instructions?

That's not the usual way to discuss CISC or RISC (and ARM fails two of the three questions anyways).

To be honest, CISC versus RISC has not been a useful distinction in architecture design for 30 years. Intel managing to make a superscalar CISC processor, the Pentium, should have put to bed any idea that there's a fundamental distinction between CISC and RISC that is useful.

The reality is that RISC isn't a single idea so much as it is a collection of ideas for how to design a microprocessor, and some of those ideas have turned out to be good and some of them have turned out to be bad. Rather than evaluating on the merits of RISC or CISC, we should evaluate on the merits of the embodied ideas. Let's stop trying to view 2020s design decisions based on 1970s models, okay?

I still don't really get why people are obsessed over RISC as an antagonist of CISC.

It's not like CISC or RISC are architectures like Transformers or Mamba. They're design philosophies with a huge amount of overlap and leeway.

for starters... drop ballast

Subject: x86 evolution for segmentation and paging

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAKSQd8WX6xH7=njcGZNNFe8m1xbyhC... https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/2026-September/151...

no-can-do the legacy-at-any-cost cargo cult crowd will say, of course

but... someone did apparently build it at scale already... so... who knows, eh?