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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.
In fact, over the years, RISC instruction sets have grown in size, and today many of them have a larger set of instructions than many CISC CPUs. [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 ...
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.
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.
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).
Classic Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) ISAs optimized by providing a larger set of more complex CPU instructions. Generally speaking, however, complex instructions inflate the number of clock cycles per instruction C l o c k C y c l e s I n s t r u c t i o n {\displaystyle \mathrm {\tfrac {ClockCycles}{Instruction}} } because they must ...
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 ...