Subjects         Chips & Upgrades   Computers   News   Opinions   Peripherals Systems Software   SysOpt

internet.commerce Be a Commerce Partner

Search for more hardware and systems terms . . .

CISC Last modified: Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Pronounced sisk, and stands for complex instruction set computer. Most personal computers, use a CISC architecture, in which the CPU supports as many as two hundred instructions. An alternative architecture, used by many workstations and also some personal computers, is RISC (reduced instruction set computer), which supports fewer instructions.