[Divver]

Hmm at Berkeley 10-14 years ago during undergrad we used MIPS in both our computer architecture class and compilers class and I wouldn’t call it obscure. Uncommon yes but not obscure.

It had a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) which at the time was considered academic but not popular in real world computers since CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) ISA like amd64 was all the rage but since Apple Silicon and its RISC-based (ARM) architecture that notion has been turned on its head. And the upcoming Qualcomm ARM laptop chip is also following the trend on high performing RISC architecture chips.

The ARM comeback has made RISC popular again for uses beyond mobile phones and academia.

[astrange]

CISC/RISC is not a useful distinction and I wouldn't call ARMv8 (at least the 64-bit kind) especially RISC.

[ffgjgf1]

Isn’t the RISC vs CISC distinction a but blurry these days with both ARM and x86 adopting a lot of stuff from the other side?

[creshal]

It's been blurry for over 20 years at this point. ARM has had "cisc-y" complex instructions for almost as long as x86 has been splitting instructions into "risk-y" micro ops.

[Gibbon1]

I think that distinction only makes sense when the hardware executes instructions directly. Like a microcode processor or one that uses jungle logic. But when you decompose optimize and cache the instruction steam on the fly, there is little meaningful difference. Offhand comments from friends more involved in that lead me to think that architecture caught academics flat footed.