Comparison of RISC and CISC

Characteristic	RISC	CISC
Instruction Set	Reduced	Complex
Number of Instructions	Less	More
Addressing Modes	Less	More
Instruction Format	Fixed	Variable
Instruction Set Type	Orthogonal	Non-Orthogonal
Number of Registers	Large	Limited
Operation on	Registers Only	Registers or Memory
Power Consumption	Low	High
Pipelining	Highly Pipelined	Less Pipelined
Performance Optimization	Software Focus	Hardware Focus
RAM Requirement	More	Less
Instruction Length	Fixed	Variable
Silicon Usage	Less	More
Execution Time	Very Short	Longer
Architecture	Harvard	Harvard or Von-Neumann