Apple Power Macintosh 7100/80AV - Manual (Page 3)

Basics Power Macintosh System Overview - 1
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.