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The best analysis of RISC vs CISC is John Mashey's classic Usenet comp.arch post, https://www.yarchive.net/comp/risc_definition.html

There he analyses existing RISC and CISC architectures, and counts various features of their instruction sets. They clearly fall into distinct camps.

But!

Back then (mid 1990s) x86 was the least CISCy CISC, and ARM was the least RISCy RISC.

However, Mashey's article was looking at arm32 which is relatively weird; arm64 is more like a conventional RISC.

So if anything, arm is more RISC now than it was in 2001.




amd64 is more RISC now than ia32 was in 2001 as well.




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