• RISC stands for “Reduced Instruction Set Computing”. The devices are designed to run very fast through the use of reduced number of machine level instructions.
  • This reduced number of instructions contributes to the increased speed. The AVR processor can execute instructions at a speed of 8MIPS for an 8MHz clock.
  • Some of the popular RISC processors are – MIPS, SUN UltraSpark, Toshibas new 64 bit processor etc.,
  • The instruction set of each RISC processor is unique. The addressing modes of RISC processors are: Absolute addressing, Register addressing, Stack addressing or by Immediate addressing.
  • Its architecture can be called as Load and Store architecture, due to register addressing only in ALU and FLPU operations.
  • When the architecture is considered, we can find that, the RISC processors act as a microcomputer. It organizes a CPU, a memory, and an I/O section.
  • The memory section is of the Harvard model, which can also access Flash code memory, data memory or EEPROM memory.
  • Usually massive pipelining is embedded in a RISC processor. The pipelining is a key to speed up RISC processors.
  • The RISC processors finds its application in areas like: Telecommunication, video and image processing etc.,
  • When we choose a RISC processor, the following issues should be checked: (i) Code Quality, (ii) Scheduling, (iii) Debugging (iv) Code expansion (v) On chip cache.

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