Basics | Power Macintosh System Overview - 1 |
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Power Macintosh System Overview
PowerPC microprocessors are a family of processors built on reduced instruction-set computing (RISC) technology. RISC processors streamline the internal workings of computers. Whereas traditional (complex instruction-set computing, or CISC) processors contain a wide variety of instructions to handle many different tasks, RISC processors contain only those instructions that are used most often. When a complex instruction is needed, a RISC processor builds it from a combination of basic instructions.
RISC processors are designed to execute these basic instructions extremely quickly. The performance gains achieved by speeding up the most-used instructions more than compensate for the time spent creating less-used instructions.
