Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) Practice Exam 2026 – All-in-One Guide to Mastering Your Certification!

RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer. This architecture is designed around a set of instructions that are simplified and optimized to execute rapidly. The key principle behind RISC is to allow the CPU to execute instructions in a single clock cycle, improving efficiency and performance.

RISC architectures typically feature a small number of simple instructions, a consistent instruction format, and a large set of registers, which helps in reducing the complexity of instruction decoding and execution. This design philosophy contrasts with Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) architectures, which support a wider variety of instructions but can lead to more complicated and slower execution of commands.

By focusing on the reduction of the instruction set, RISC improves instruction throughput and takes advantage of pipelining—where multiple instruction phases are overlapped—to further enhance performance. RISC has influenced modern processor design significantly and remains a foundational concept in computer architecture.