Most of us will be familiar at some level with the operation of a basic CPU, usually through exposure to microprocessors of the type that find their way into our projects. We can look at its internal ...

Hello all, I have a question regarding CPU instruction sets. I have heard that the aging x86 instruction set is holding back progress, so to speak. So I was thinking about what would make a better, ...

I'm still busily beavering away on the idea of my Heath Robinson Rube Goldberg mixed-technology computer (relays, vacuum tubes, transistors, fluidic logic, etc.). As you'll see if you visit the above ...

For those not immediately familiar with RISC-V, it is a relatively new CPU architecture which takes advantage of Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) principles. RISC-V is an open standard ...

An Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) defines the software interface through which for example a central processor unit (CPU) is controlled. Unlike early computer systems which didn’t define a ...

x86, the mainstream instruction set architecture for PC CPUs, originated from the Intel 8086 processor and has been in use for 46 years. Technology blog Hackaday claims that x86 will be extinct in the ...

The area of any part of a design contributes both to the silicon cost and to the power consumption. A simplistic following of the “A” in a processor IP vendor’s PPA numbers can be misleading. A ...