Back in 1998, when I first began covering hardware at the newly launched Ars Technica, much of my writing focused on issues raised by the raging Mac vs. PC flame wars that took place in computing ...

Try to investigate the differences between the x86 and ARM processor families (or x86 and the Apple M1), and you'll see the acronyms CISC and RISC. It's a common way to frame the discussion, but not a ...

The processor we will be considering in this tutorial is the MIPS processor. The MIPS processor, designed in 1984 by researchers at Stanford University, is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) ...

A new instruction set by the original creator of MIPS aims to reinvent the ultra-low power, high-efficiency processor -- and to do so with an architecture that's fundamentally open and available to ...

Ten years ago, I waded into the then-raging “Mac vs. PC” wars with a lengthy treatise on “RISC vs. CISC: the Post-RISC Era.” In the conclusion to that article, I declared the “RISC vs. CISC” debate ...

Chris Thomas was a reporter at Android Police from 2022 until 2025. As smartphone users, we carry an incredible amount of computing power in our pockets every day. Even today's most affordable phones ...

When it comes to personal computing, most of the growth today is in the mobile market, not traditional desktop PCs and laptops. You could say that the PC concept is morphing to include next-generation ...