fault Posted July 13, 2004 Share Posted July 13, 2004 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! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
0 quadsoft Posted July 13, 2004 Share Posted July 13, 2004 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
0 strumbum Posted July 13, 2004 Share Posted July 13, 2004 Sun loves the RISC for its processors while intel loves CISC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
0 shake Posted July 13, 2004 Share Posted July 13, 2004 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
0 fault Posted July 13, 2004 Author Share Posted July 13, 2004 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? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
0 neowin_hipster Posted July 14, 2004 Share Posted July 14, 2004 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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fault
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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