RISC and CISC Processors

[Deknoid]

If I may ask, what is it that makes RISC CPUs achieve a faster performance? 

I'm not sure, but is this answer that I came up with legitimate?

 

"Due to the RISC's small set of instructions, high level language compilers are able to produce more efficient code. Thanks to this, the speed of the operation can be maximized, thus having a lower execution time."

 

 

Thanks c: 

[Guest trucker2]

This was a big topic in the 90's Intel actually mad a risc chip. I think it was i860 or something like that. It was really hyped but never went anywhere as far as I know.

[Glenwing]

It's really scenario-dependent for who's better. But there's a reason IBM's RISC architecture (PowerPC) eventually lost against Intel's CISC stuff (x86) for desktop-level software back in the day.

[Stefan1024]

RISC: Needs more cycles per insturction, but can run faster because it is simple.

CISC: Needs less cycles per instuction, but is more sophisticated and therefor it is difficult to achive a high clock speeds.

 

Both designs have it's advantages. If you are using a lot of instructions only natively supported by CISC, CISC will be faster. If not it will be beaten by RISC due to the higher clock speed.

But it's hard to say it gerneral because there are a lot of CISC or RISC based architectures out there.

[Deknoid]

Thing is I do know that it's scenario-dependent on which one would be faster at the time being, but sadly I don't have a scenario to work on.

 

This question goes by saying: "How RISC CPUs achieve a faster performance", that's all there is to it.

 

I'll most probably take Stefan's answer into account and state that RISC is faster due to the fact that it needs more cycles per instruction, but can in fact run faster because it's simple.

 

 

Thanks a lot for the replies!