Processors

Question 1

RISC

Answer 1

Reduced Instruction Set Computers
Small number of fixed-length instructions
One instruction executed per clock cycle
Easy to pipeline
Limited addressing modes
Software over hardware
Uses a lot of RAM
Less material needed, smaller power consumption
Good for battery-powered devices like phones

Question 2

CISC

Answer 2

Complex Instruction Set Computer
Wide range of complex commands
Makes programs shorter
Cycles have varying length so pipelining is hard
Fewer registers
Chips are more expensive
Used for simple embedded systems

Question 3

GPU

Answer 3

Graphic Processing Unit
Processor on a graphics card
Own set of RAM
Could contain 1000+ cores
Best known for uses in gaming
Also used for machine learning - thousands of cores optimised to parallel process calculations required eg for training a neural network

Question 4

Multicore system

Answer 4

Computers with more than one processing unit
Generally more cores = more instructions executed
More efficient but more expensive
Many programs are not written for parallel processing