Intel powers an Arduino [LWN.net]

Intel powers an Arduino

Posted Oct 6, 2013 10:56 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Intel powers an Arduino by drag
Parent article: Intel powers an Arduino for the first time with new “Galileo” board (ars technica)

Intel (and AMD) processors are actually RISC. They have not produced a true CISC processor since the Pentium 2 I think.

Apparently it's still true for AMD, but no longer true for Intel. I'm not 100% convinced that it's just a shrink of P54C but something like this highly likely: this will explain all observable quite well: that's how you can make it five times smaller and ten times more energy-efficient then Atom, etc. Five times smaller means that it has about the same number of transistors as Pentium !!! core and there are a lot of other things besides core!

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Intel powers an Arduino

Posted Oct 6, 2013 12:31 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

I'm sure you can dig something up about this, but I'm also sure that various AMD product lines went through a transition to RISC (or started out life as RISC) with some kind of x86 translation being used to satisfy the needs of everyone who can't manage to recompile their software. See this page on the Nx586 with a note about RISC86 instructions, for instance.

Of course, AMD have acquired technologies that should have allowed them to put desktop-class products into low power devices. The Geode CPUs (which will supposedly be discontinued fairly soon) are an example of this, although they apparently use traditional microcode implementing x86 instructions directly. Maybe AMD didn't see any future for this approach either in terms of power or performance, effectively bringing to an end a product line that in fact originally came from another x86 competitor, Cyrix. The NexGen approach was the one that worked best for AMD, I guess.