RISC processor

The conceptual developments of the RISC computer architecture began with the IBM 801 project in the late 1970s, but these were not immediately put into use. Designers in California picked up the 801 concepts in two seminal projects, Stanford MIPS and Berkeley RISC. These were commercialized in the 1980s as the MIPS and SPARC systems. IBM eventually produced RISC designs based on further work on the 801 concept, the IBM POWER architecture, PowerPC, and Power ISA. As the projects matured, many similar designs, produced in the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s, such as ARM, PA-RISC, and Alpha, created central processing units that increased the commercial utility of the Unix workstation and of embedded processors in laser printers, the routers, and similar products. RISC processors are used in supercomputers, such as the Fugaku.