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I don't even know what RISC or CISC means anymore. They're bad, non-descriptive terms. 30 years ago, RISC or CISC meant something, but not anymore.

Today's CPUs are pipelined, out-of-order, speculative, superscalar, (sometimes) SMT, SIMD, multi-core with MESI-based snooping for cohesive caches. These words actually have meaning (and in particular, describe a particular attribute of performance for modern cores).

RISC or CISC? useful for internet flamewars I guess but I've literally never been able to use either term in a technical discussion.

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I said what I said earlier: this M1 Pro / M1 Max, and the ARM Neoverse cores, are missing SMT, which seems to come standard on every other server-class CPU (POWER9, Intel Skylake-X, AMD EPYC).

Neoverse N1 makes up for it with absurdly high core counts, so maybe its not a big deal. Apple M1 however has very small core counts, I doubt that Apple M1 would be good in a server setting... at least not with this configuration. They'd have to change things dramatically to compete at the higher end.




Today RISC just means an ISA is fixed-length load-store. No uarch implications.


Here is one meaning:

Intel microcode updates added new machine opcodes to address spectre/meltdown exploits.

On a true RISC, that's not possible.


https://www.zdnet.com/article/meltdown-spectre-ibm-preps-fir...

Or are you going to argue that the venerable POWER-architecture is somehow not "true RISC" ??

https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/checking-aix-protection-ag...


If its got microcode, it's not RISC.


POWER9, RISC-V, and ARM all have microcoded instructions. In particular, division, which is very complicated.

As all CPUs have decided that hardware-accelerated division is a good idea (and in particular: microcoded, single-instruction division makes more sense than spending a bunch of L1 cache on a series of instructions that everyone knows is "just division" and/or "modulo"), microcode just makes sense.

The "/" and "%" operators are just expected on any general purpose CPU these days.

30 years ago, RISC processors didn't implement divide or modulo. Today, all processors, even the "RISC" ones, implement it.




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