Can someone explain briefly the difference in performance and functionallity between CISC and RISC. I know mostly nothing on technical details of how CPUs work, especially instruction sets.
Anyway, how popular are ARM processors today? Have they received an increase of demand because of smartphones/tablets only? I really despise the whole mobile computer thing, it killed the desktop market a few years back (we used to have proper retailers in Romania, not anymore, it's all about phones now). If they'd be that much more efficient than x86 they'd garner more attention until now.
with RISC you get damn cheap processors that have good performance. CISC is stuff like x86. you can do tons of logic and graphics computation because of all the command sets that it supports. the great thing about RISK style processors, is the power soncumption is very low for the performance. which is why ARM is used to much in mobile devices. the main reason ARM is not being used in computers, is because microsoft has a shitty OS that cant run fully on ARM platforms. you can actualy run a full linux distro on arm already.
sorry if this is a short reply, but i have to run soon.you said you dont quite understand what instruction sets are, well. its simple. if you tell a computer to add two numbers, the command "add" and the memory address to those numbers are loaded into the cpu's command queue. when the cpu gets to the command, it does what it does, eg adds two numbers. so a CISC processor will have tons of commands that are posible, where RISC styled cpus focus on having the bare minimum ammount of instructions.
if you want to see the future market for RISC based shit, look up parallella, it used arm processors to command some risc co-processors, and had very high performance for very low money.