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[assembly] RISC Vs CISC?


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Hey, I found out that...

RISC = Reduced Instruction Set Computing --- Used in Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC processors

CISC = Complex Instruction Set Computing --- Used in Intel processors

A website also stated this: "...CISC is slowly losing popularity to RISC designs; currently all the fastest processors in the world are RISC."

Q1) Can someone explain why it is losing popularity? I'm curious!

Q2) What do AMD processors use? CISC?

Q3) How about console units like the old Nintendo, PS1, or the new ones like XBOX, PS2? What do they use?

Thanks for any help!

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1) I doubt RISC is losing popularity due to it being used soley in ARM chips(cellphones, pda's, etc)

2) AMD and the G4 actually mix both CISC and RISC in its chip design.

3) Xbox uses a stock P3 so its safe to say it uses CISC. Newer consoles based on IBM's PPC970 will be undoubtably be RISC based.

if you want a good explaination and comparison of the 2 you should read http://arstechnica.com/cpu/4q99/risc-cisc/rvc-1.html

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all pentium processors are RISCs with an x86 translater on top for compatibilty... RISCs are better because they are load store machines and therefore they can have pipelines implemented inthem that introduces parallelism in the processors.

so i doubt there are any "true" RISC or CISC processors. RISCs are better but it is not possible to create a pure risc processors without having to port all ur applications to that architecture. That was y the itanium went down

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Ahh okies, thanks for all the info. Yep I was just wanting general grounding info. Cheers, I'll go read up some more.

Btw. so the titanium was meant to be a pure RISC processor? What about this EPIC architecture I've heard of? Was that ever/going to be implemented by Intel?

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There are more then just risc an cisc architectures. It's like saying the only two colors are white and black.

Epic is the Itanium architecture that intel developped. It relies on the compiler for optimizations due to branching among other things. It hasn't taken off because of the ****ty tools.

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