Memories can be large and relatively inexpensive. The shift to RISC processors in recent years has been motivated in part by technological changes. This was important at a time when RAM was small and relatively expensive. It is characteristic of RISC architectures that Instructions are of a few simple and regular forms. Processors provide many registers.
Control is hardwired, being comparatively simple.
The instruction set is designed to minimize branches, so that pipelining will be more effective. The architecture permits an additional coprocessor, but specifies only an interface, not what the coprocessor does. Memory organization and basic data formats Memory is byte addressable, addresses refer to individual bytes. Signed integers use two's complement representation. The physical memory is typically at least 32 bits wide.