What's the difference between MIPS and RISC?

mips
Niklas R. picture Niklas R. · Oct 22, 2012 · Viewed 13.2k times · Source

It says that MIPS is a type of RISC. What is the history? Are both formats / instruction models / programming models, how to tell MIPS from RISC? Is RISC a wider concept?

Answer

John Watts picture John Watts · Oct 22, 2012

Yes. RISC is a wider concept. MIPS is RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Chip) architecture. Reduced (RISC) architectures tend to be simpler and have a small number of operations. Complex (CISC) architectures like x86 have more instructions, some of which take the place of a sequence of RISC instructions.

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