CISC

Advanced Architectures: RISC, Flynn, and Modern Parallelism

2026-05-14·3749 words·18 mins

Computer Architecture RISC CISC parallelism multicore SMP NUMA hardware

With 10% serial code, eight cores make the program only 4.7 times faster, and no number of cores gets past 10 times. We close the series with RISC and CISC, performance metrics, Flynn’s taxonomy, SMP, clusters, NUMA, multicore, and Amdahl’s Law.

CPU: Components, Instruction Cycle, and What Happens Inside the Processor

2026-04-16·3934 words·19 mins

Computer Architecture CPU instruction cycle processor hardware CISC RISC

A 2 GHz processor can execute more instructions per second than a 3 GHz one. To understand why, we open up the CPU: ALU, control unit, registers, flags, decoder, and clock, along with the microevents of the fetch cycle in formal notation.

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