Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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.
[36] [37] Some RISC processors such as the PowerPC have instruction sets as large as the CISC IBM System/370, for example; conversely, the DEC PDP-8—clearly a CISC CPU because many of its instructions involve multiple memory accesses—has only 8 basic instructions and a few extended instructions. [38]
An early (retroactively) RISC-labeled processor (IBM 801 – IBM's Watson Research Center, mid-1970s) was a tightly pipelined simple machine originally intended to be used as an internal microcode kernel, or engine, in CISC designs, [citation needed] but also became the processor that introduced the RISC idea to a somewhat larger audience.
A single RISC instruction typically performs only a single operation, such as an "add" of registers or a "load" from a memory location into a register. 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 ...
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).
If a CPU has an NX bit, it is more likely to be viewed as being a complex instruction set computer (CISC) or reduced instruction set computer (RISC). MISC chips typically lack hardware memory protection of any kind, unless there is an application specific reason to have the feature. If a CPU has a microcode subsystem, that excludes it from ...
RISC microprocessors like these were the first to have superscalar execution, because RISC architectures free transistors and die area which can be used to include multiple execution units and the traditional uniformity of the instruction set favors superscalar dispatch (this was why RISC designs were faster than CISC designs through the 1980s ...
The RISC Single Chip, or RSC, is a single-chip microprocessor developed and fabricated by International Business Machines (IBM). The RSC was a feature-reduced single-chip implementation of the POWER1 , a multi-chip central processing unit (CPU) which implemented the POWER instruction set architecture (ISA).