A-Z of the Digital World

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R is for RISC. This is the acronym for Reduced Instruction Set Computing, which seems to be the future of microprocessor design. The first PC-oriented RISC chip, the PowerPC, was released by Apple, Motorola and IBM in March 1994. But hot on its heels in the consumer market are such names as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and even Intel, whose non-RISC chips (such as the 80x86 family and Pentium) dominate the current PC market.

Intel's designs, like those of many other microprocessors before them, use CISC - Complex Instruction Set Computing. The difference between RISC and CISC is in the way that they carry out the instructions in programs.

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