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An instruction set architecture (ISA) is an abstract model of a computer, also referred to as computer architecture.A realization of an ISA is called an implementation.An ISA permits multiple implementations that may vary in performance, physical size, and monetary cost (among other things); because the ISA serves as the interface between software and hardware.
Before the RISC philosophy became prominent, many computer architects tried to bridge the so-called semantic gap, i.e., to design instruction sets that directly support high-level programming constructs such as procedure calls, loop control, and complex addressing modes, allowing data structure and array accesses to be combined into single instructions.
The Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC processor is a type of RISC microprocessor.. In electronics and computer science, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer architecture designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks.
A RISC instruction set normally has a fixed instruction length, whereas a typical CISC instruction set has instructions of widely varying length. However, as RISC computers normally require more and often longer instructions to implement a given task, they inherently make less optimal use of bus bandwidth and cache memories.
Note that in classic RISC, all instructions have the same length. (This is one thing that separates RISC from CISC [1]). In the original RISC designs, the size of an instruction is 4 bytes, so always add 4 to the instruction address, but don't use PC + 4 for the case of a taken branch, jump, or exception (see delayed branches, below).
An analogy is the difference between scalar and vector arithmetic. A superscalar processor is a mixture of the two. A superscalar processor is a mixture of the two. Each instruction processes one data item, but there are multiple execution units within each CPU thus multiple instructions can be processing separate data items concurrently.
The reason given is: Many CISC processors now do instruction fetch and decode in hardware, and execute most if not all instructions in hardware, and both RISC and CISC processors execute several operations per clock cycle. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (December 2023)
The main differences between V7 and V8 were the addition of integer multiply and divide instructions, and an upgrade from 80-bit "extended-precision" floating-point arithmetic to 128-bit "quad-precision" arithmetic. SPARC V8 served as the basis for IEEE Standard 1754-1994, an IEEE standard for a 32-bit microprocessor architecture.