RISC

Developed and introduced by IBM in 1980, RISC is short for Reduced Instruction Set Computer and pronounced as risk. RISC is a processor architecture that requires less instructions to operate, causing the processors to be faster than earlier CISC processors. Today, RISC and CISC processors share many of the same instruction techniques and operate at similar speeds.

Also see: CISC, Processor definitions, Superscalar, X86