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RISC Architecture Really Did Change Everything
“RISC architecture is gonna change everything.” Those absurdly geeky, incredibly prophetic words were spoken 30 years ago. Today, they’re somehow truer than ever.
Established tech companies figured that as hardware design improved and programming languages got more sophisticated, computers shouldn’t remain simple; they should be taught larger vocabularies, with longer words. In those years, a rising company in the UK called Arm—the “r” in its name stood for RISC—was working with Steve Jobs on tablet-sized devices that needed smaller, faster CPUs. When Patterson walks me out of the Berkeley building at the end of our dizzying afternoon together, we stop by a handsome bronze plaque in the lobby that commemorates his “milestone” creation of the first RISC microprocessor.
Or read this on Wired