Dictionary of Computer and Internet Terms: RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer, pronounced "risk")
RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer, pronounced "risk")
a CPU design with a small number of machine language instructions, each of which can be executed very quickly. The Sun Sparcstation and the PowerPC are examples of RISC computers. The opposite of RISC is CISC.
RISC and CISC computers can run the same kinds of software; the only difference is in what the software looks like in machine code. CISC is faster than RISC if memory access is relatively slow; the RISC machine has to fetch more instructions from memory than the CISC machine to do the same work. RISC is faster than CISC if memory access is very fast.
