Why “RISC” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
Sure, I'm not saying that IBM's switch to services is some brilliant panacea for all proprietary hardware makers, just citing it as one of the market changes at the time that Su…
by schmichael · Sep 21, 2026
Really? When I first met Sun machines they were selling 68k-based Sun machines that were better specced than Apple and Amiga and such but left them dependent on Motorola’s archi…
by PaulHoule · Sep 21, 2026
No, they don't. x86 is a superscalar processor, and it does what all superscalar processors do--translate the instructions into µops for execution and dispatch to the various ex…
by jcranmer · Sep 18, 2026
Yes, but the “architecture-independent” bytecode for these RISC machines that run underneath your various Intel and AMD CPU models is the x86_64 instruction set.
by sph · Sep 18, 2026
I mean don't modern CPUs basically just run an x86_64 emulator on a RISC machine anyway? Like there's a layer between the microcode and the actual x86 instructions already.
by ErroneousBosh · Sep 18, 2026
and the DEC Alpha RISC CPU was on fire, and ran circles around the desktop CISC CPUs
by fl7305 · Sep 17, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "risc" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "risc" over time.
RISC is an abbreviation for reduced instruction set computer. Read more on Wikipedia