What RISC is about in today's context is somewhat hazy and there are lots of views and opinions about it. RISC was a branding of a shift that happened in the 70

What RISC is about in today's context is somewhat hazy and there are lots of views and opinions about it. RISC was a branding of a shift that happened in the 70s and 80s. It was a time of tight transistor budgets, and there was a make-or-break sweet spot of instruction set size and complexity that could be hardcoded in the ~100k transistors (vs microcoded[1], as was the norm). IMO the fundamental idea was that you should optimize the instruction set for your applications to a certain extent, while still keeping it coherent for humans and stable across processor generations. RISC still gives ease of use weight, without this your instruction set might be a cryptic machine learning box of mystery operations with bizarre temporal/hidden state semantics (think delay slots but much much worse) that gets rebooted on every CPU release. [1] See eg this Motorola 68000 internals description on how the microcoded thing worked: http://www.easy68k.com/paulrsm/doc/dpbm68k1.htm http://www.easy68k.com/paulrsm/doc/dpbm68k1.htm