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sitharustoday at 3:52 AM0 repliesview on HN

The main distinction now is RISC-descended designs use a load-modify-store instruction set with all ALU functions being register-register, and consequently have a lot more (visible) registers than CISC-descended ISAs (mostly just x86 really).

Historically RISC instructions were 1:1 with CPU operations, in theory allowing the compiler to better optimise logic, but this isn't really true anymore. High performance ARM CPUs use µOPs and macro-op fusion, though not to the extent of x86 CPUs.

This document from ARM has some details on how they use micro-ops, https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102160/latest