April 2003
Intermediate to advanced
576 pages
15h 13m
English
Successive implementations of a computer architecture are routinely brought forth by a hardware innovator at fairly frequent intervals. A completely new architecture, or a whole new class of architectures, appears much less frequently.
Contemporary architectures fall into three classes. Complex Instruction Set Computers (CISC) typically include large numbers of machine instructions of many different styles. That complexity poses difficulties of implementation, because each style of instruction may require substantial real estate on the computer chip. Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC) are defined by smaller numbers of machine instructions of very few styles. The savings in space on a computer ...