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CISC

The factor factor, part 1

Listen carefully. I am about to reveal one of the great apparent secrets of the microprocessor industry. This secret largely determines whether new products succeed or fail.

I don't know why it seems to be a secret. It's simple enough. I figured it out early, in my first job in the industry, and I've seen it demonstrated over and over since then. I'm hardly the only one who knows this secret; I've seen dozens of talks that allude to it, and a few that mentioned it specifically. I've talked about it myself in articles I wrote for Microprocessor Report and other publications.

Unfortunately, I've also seen hundreds of products brought to market in apparent ignorance of this simple rule, and they've all failed, wasting the billions of dollars invested in their development. Assuming the developers weren't throwing away their money on purpose, I conclude they must not have known the one basic fact that doomed their projects, which means it must be a secret.

The secret is...… Read more

AMD's SSE5 ends the old RISC vs. CISC debate

Remember how I said that Moore's Law is "the full-employment act for computer pundits"?

In the smaller niche of microprocessor journalism, there used to be another topic that was always good for a column: RISC vs. CISC.

In the early days of computing, a CPU (central processing unit) was a series of refrigerator-size cabinets in the computer room. Memory capacity was very limited. Computer scientists would analyze how programs executed on these machines and look for ways to shorten and speed up their programs by defining… Read more