Intel powers an Arduino

Posted Oct 7, 2013 13:52 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Intel powers an Arduino by renox
Parent article: Intel powers an Arduino for the first time with new “Galileo” board (ars technica)

> Oh, they ditched the x86 ISA, now they have a reduced INSTRUCTION SET cpu(computer)?

They didn't?

> Tell me how you or your compiler can access directly these RISC instructions?

It doesn't.

> You can't so the external instruction set is still CISC, whether it is implemented internally using a RISC or not doesn't change the external instruction set accessible.

Irrelevant to what I was talking about.

Intel powers an Arduino

Posted Oct 7, 2013 14:26 UTC (Mon) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (1 responses)

> Irrelevant to what I was talking about.

And? You still wrote an incorrect assertion..
*Using* internally a RISC or *being* a RISC i.e having an externally accessible ISA which is "reduced" are different things, whether it is relevant to your discussion or not I don't care.

Intel powers an Arduino

Posted Oct 7, 2013 15:44 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

RISC design principles are about more than just how many instructions there are and what they look like, even though you can argue that most RISC CPUs drifted away from those principles pretty quickly. One can argue that x86 instructions translated to "RISC instructions" does resemble x86 instructions being implemented by microcode, but I imagine that refactoring the microcode and working out a better set of directly implemented instructions is very much taking the RISC approach, even if all this is hidden by the x86 layer in the final design.