RISC

Stands for "Reduced Instruction Set Computing," pronounced like "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 most Pentium chips. In 1974, John Cocke of IBM Research worked to make an even faster version of the CISC chip, and came up with a result that majorly reduced the number of instructions the chip needed to perform. The new technology was not only faster than CISC chips, but the chips were also easier 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, which causes the chips to suffer in floating-point calculations.