The RISC penalty

All the major players in the workstation and personal computer market are committed to RISC. The author looks at the view that RISC is not better, and does not hold the key to high speed computing. He claims that the only reason this foolishness has got so far is that the real differences between RISC and complex-instruction-set computing (CISC) are relatively small in the big performance picture. Hard work and good marketing more than compensate for the differences.