Well, RISC stands for "Reduced Instruction Set Computing,"and is
pronounced "risk." It is arguably the fastest and most effiecient
microprocessor technology available today. The RISC architechture is an
improvement upon the CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing)
architecture used in the original Intel Pentium chips. In 1974, John
Cocke of IBM Research was working on making a faster version of the CISC
chip and came up with a design that significantly reduced the number of
instructions need for performing computations. The new design was not
only faster than the CISC architecture, but the chips were also smaller
and less expensive to manufacture. Motorola's PowerPC chips (such as the
G4 in Power Macs) are the most widely used RISC-based chips. Intel has
slowly been integrating RISC technology into its chips, but they still
are mostly CISC-based.
