RISC Architecture
PA-RISC, as its name implies, is a RISC, or Reduced Instruction Set Computer, architecture. But there is more to RISC than just a smaller instruction set. There are several characteristics that are common to all RISC architectures, including PA-RISC, that make these systems fast and easy to implement. Among these are:
Fixed instruction size— All instructions are 32 bits wide.
Small number of addressing modes— PA-RISC has only three methods of specifying a memory address.
Simplified memory access— The only instructions that access memory are explicit loads and stores. Computational operations are done between registers.
These characteristics make for a fast, simple hardware implementation. Performance gains can then be accomplished ...
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