RISC vs CISC doesn't matter any more. I wrote an article (once featured on HN, when ARM first began making waves) that is basically "a crashcourse on CPU architecture for dummies" on my blog: http://neosmart.net/blog/2010/the-arm-the-ppc-the-x86-and-th...
The tl;dr of it is that today, the RISC vs CISC or ARM vs x86 debate doesn't really matter - that's just a question of what "APIs" (if you will) are exposed from the CPU. Internally, they're all approaching working the same way.
The tl;dr of it is that today, the RISC vs CISC or ARM vs x86 debate doesn't really matter - that's just a question of what "APIs" (if you will) are exposed from the CPU. Internally, they're all approaching working the same way.