Word: risc
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Moreover, the newest workstations contain microprocessor chips endowed with an advanced technology called RISC (reduced instruction-set computer). Because the instructions embedded in the circuitry of the streamlined chips are simpler and relatively few in number, they take less time to execute. The computers that have RISC chips are faster and more powerful than standard models. One result is that a workstation can produce graphics that are far more detailed than those generated by personal computers...
...chips achieve their performance breakthroughs? In a word: RISC, for reduced instruction set computer. RISC is not a new technology, but a fresh approach to computing that challenges 25 years of semiconductor design. It focuses on a computer's most basic commands: the instructions that are embedded, or hard-wired, into the silicon circuitry of the machine's central processing unit. The first computers made do with a handful of primitive commands, such as LOAD, ADD and STORE, which programmers combined to perform complex tasks. Lacking a command to multiply 6 times 5, for example, they had to instruct their...
...increased complexity had its cost. Studies showed that 20% of the instructions were doing 80% of the work. The rest were like expensive extras on a limousine: rarely used luxuries that took up space and slowed performance. The advocates of RISC, declaring that it was time to go back to basics, stripped away the nonessentials and optimized the performance of the 50 or so most frequently used commands. Says Ben Anixter, vice president at Advanced Micro Devices, a Sunnyvale, Calif., firm that is introducing its first RISC chip in two weeks: "It is like going from the complicated old piston...
...first, the industry was reluctant to switch to RISC. But the new crop of chips has made believers out of almost everybody. Sun, a company best known for its engineering computers, got into the chip business last summer when it began licensing a RISC processor to AT&T, Unisys and Xerox. MIPS, which introduced its second generation of the chips last month, supplies microprocessors to Tandem, Prime, and Silicon Graphics. Hewlett-Packard has built an entire line of computers around RISC technology...
Most important, IBM is making a major commitment to RISC. IBM Vice President Andrew Heller suggests that RISC technology could produce startling advances in electronic speech recognition, machine vision and artificial intelligence -- all of which require superfast microprocessors. Says Heller: "Computers that can listen and talk back, and recognize objects on sight, are not so farfetched. RISC will help make all that a reality, and it's going to happen this century...