BASICS OF COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE AND THE BINARY NUMBER SYSTEM 11
are ARM, Power PC, Sun’s Sparc processors and the like. Many of them found their
applications in the embedded processing fi eld.
e main features of RISC are that they have only simple instructions implemented
in a single clock. However, there is an irony in that, many RISC processors have as many
complex instructions as CISC processors. Probably this can be justifi ed by explaining
that such complexinstructions have been implemented using microprogramming rather
than a direct hardware realization. Microprogramming is a method of implementing
the control unit of a computer by breaking down instructions into a sequence of small
programming steps.
While the RISC versus CISC controv ...