Tag: ISA

Intel Blog: Question: Does Software Actually Use New Instruction Sets?

Over time, Intel and other processor core designers add more and more instructions to the cores in our machines. A good question is how quickly and easily new instructions added to an Instruction-Set Architecture (ISA) actually gets employed by software to improve performance and add new capabilities. Considering that our operating systems and programs are generally backwards-compatible, and run on all kind of hardware, can they actually take advantage of new instructions?

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Does ISA Matter for Performance?

When I grew up with computers, the big RISC vs CISC debate was raging. At the time, in the late 1980s, it did indeed seem that RISC was inherently superior to CISC. SPARCs, MIPS, and Alpha all outpaced boring old x86, VAX and 68000 processors. This turned out to be a historical parenthesis, as the Pentium Pro from Intel showed how RISC-style performance could be mated to a CISC ISA. However, maybe ISAs still do matter.

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