Ask The Wizard (RISC vs. INTEL x86)

Dear Wizard of 'OZ',

I was wondering what the difference is between a RISC based processor and an Intel X86 based processor?

Signed,

Riscy Business

Dear Riscy

This is a very complicated question for this forum, but here is some basic information...

The reduced instruction set computer, or RISC, is a CPU design philosophy that favours a reduced instruction set as well as a simpler set of instructions. The idea was originally inspired by the discovery that many of the features that were included in traditional CPU designs to facilitate coding were being ignored by the programs that were running on them. Also these more complex features took several processor cycles to be performed. Additionally, the performance gap between the processor and main memory was increasing.

However, despite many successes, RISC has made few inroads into the desktop PC and commodity server markets, where Intel's x86 platform remains the dominant processor architecture (Intel is facing increased competition from AMD, but even AMD's processors implement the x86 platform.) There are three main reasons for this. One, the very large base of proprietary PC applications are written for x86, whereas no RISC platform has a similar installed base, and this meant PC users were locked into the x86 despite a lack of performance. The second is that, although RISC was indeed able to scale up in performance quite quickly and cheaply, Intel took advantage of its large market by spending vast amounts of money on processor development. Intel could spend many times as much as any RISC manufacturer on improving design and manufacturing, making up for flaws inherent in the basic x86 architecture.

Hope this helps,

Yrs,

The Wizard