Instruction Set Computer News Today

'Smalltalk On A RISC' and three mysteries!

Not only is Apple investing in ARMs initial public offering in the US, filed paperwork has revealed that the pair have signed a long-term collaboration agreement spanning potentially more than two decades.

Four decades ago, the CPU market was far more diverse than it is today. One company called NexGen had backing from big PC names, plenty of capital,...

CPU fun Introduction In this post we’ll look at the performance of a simple atomic operation on a couple of Arm® AArch64 machines. In particular we’ll show the improvement that comes from using the simple, single-instruction, atomics in the Arm V8.1a architecture in preference to the more general Load-Locked, Store-Conditional (LL-SC) implementation in the earlier architectures. The improved performance of the newer architecture was mentioned in a tweet, so as I already had a benchmark fo...