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Historical Notes on CISC and RISC: Difference between revisions
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Meanwhile, other chip designers were going in other directions. One, Motorola, started over with a classic 'big' design, the 68000, which resembled a scaled-down version of the VAX in many ways, with 16 general-purpose registers and a complicated instruction set. This would become the CPU for several successful workstations, as well as the original [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh Apple Macintosh] line. Later design extensions would complicate this, though not to the extent that the 80x86 design would be.
Still, it was growing clear that the complex instruction sets were growing counter-productive. Thus, many chip designers decided to go in the opposite direction: minimal instruction sets, no microcoding, load/store architectures with few if any operations working on memory directly, large register sets which could be used to avoid accessing main memory whenever possible, and an emphasis on supporting high-level languages rather than assembly programing. This new idea, which was called RISC (reduced instruction set computer), would be the basis several new CPU designs, including the MIPS, the SPARC, the ARM, the IBM [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER_microprocessors POWER] architecture<sup>[[Historical Notes on CISC and RISC#powerpc|3]]</sup>, which, and the Alpha. Of these, all but the Alpha remain in use today for certain specialized areas of use, and the ARM in particular has become the ''de facto'' standard for mobile computing, though for the most part the domination by the Windows-x86 system has forced them out of the market for home and business systems.
== Footnotes ==
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