Checking In On the ISA Wars and Its Impact on CPU Architectures
1 min read
Summary
The Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) works as an interface between software and hardware within computer systems.
The ISAs often come from proprietary designs from the CPU manufacturers themselves.
Recently, the market has stabilised to a few major ISAs used for each application, with x86 dominating desktops and servers, while ARM is more prominent in low power and portable devices, and IBM’s Power ISA is typically used for larger machines.
This article looks at how ISAs continue to be relevant, given that CPUs are almost entirely RISC-based these days, and therefore have a relatively small number of heavily optimised instructions.
It concludes that, although there is a reluctance to use anything other than x86, ARM, and RISC-V in the West, China continues to provide a decent market for newer ISAs.
