Analysis: x86 Vs PPC
Linked by Nicholas Blachford on Wed 9th Jul 2003 16:43 UTC
Talk, Rumors, X Versus Y This article started life when I was asked to write a comparison of x86 and PowerPC CPUs for work. We produce PowerPC based systems and are often asked why we use PowerPC CPUs instead of x86 so a comparison is rather useful. While I have had an interest in CPUs for quite some time but I have never explored this issue in any detail so writing the document proved an interesting exercise. I thought my conclusions would be of interest to OSNews readers so I've done more research and written this new, rather more detailed article. This article is concerned with the technical differences between the families not the market differences.
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Why CISC isn't so bad
by Anton Klotz on Wed 9th Jul 2003 19:37 UTC

As Nicholas pointed out in this article CISC-commands are hard to decode, they are more complex, have different length ... But this also means that a CISC command carries more information from the memory to the processor than a RISC command. Nicholas also stated that the bottleneck is the processor <-> memory connection. So you can regard CISC commandos as a kind of compression algorithm, so more information can be transported to the CPU, which has time to decode this information into something it can handle optimal.

I can't provide you a link, but IBM thinks about integrating a GZIP-unit at memory controller and at processor for its zSeries, so the data are compressed before transfer.

Anton