One of the deeper dives into RISC vs CISC I've seen

[Chuck Guzis]

On 6/16/19 8:17 AM, Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote:

> Still, the basic idea of RISC still applies; make the CPU clock rate as fast as
> possible by making the instructions simple, and let software deal with the resulting
> issues.

I'll mention in passing here that the goal of executing the maximum
number of instructions per unit time is a bit of a red herring.  What
really matters is delivering the largest number of results per unit
time.   So SIMD ISAs can blow away scalar RISC implementations for
certain classes of problems, which is why they've been part of
multimedia for a long time now and are even part of ARM (e.g. Neon).

--Chuck