I liked the article, but I found the random remark about RISC vs CISC to be very similar to what …
I liked the article, but I found the random remark about RISC vs CISC to be very similar to what the author is complaining about. The difference between the Apple M series and AMD's Zen series is NOT a RISC vs CISC issue. In fact, many would argue it's fair to say that ARM is not RISC and x86-64 is not CISC. These terms were used to refer to machines vastly different from what we have today, and the RISC vs CISC debate, like the LISP machine debate, really only lasted like 5 years. The fact is, we are all using out-of-order superscalar hardware where the decoder(s) of the CPU is not even close to the main thing consuming power and area on these chips. Under the hood they are all doing pretty much the same thing. But because it has a name and a marketable "war" and that people can easily understand the difference between fixed-width vs variable-width encodings, people overestimate the significance of the one part they understand compared to the internal engineering choices and process node choices that actually matter that people don't know about or understand. …
Original discussionThe lost cause of the Lisp machines171 source comments · at import