What are the characteristics of a RISC processor that distinguish it from a CISC processor? Does it matter whether this question is asked in 2015 or 1990?

What will be an ideal response?

The classic distinction between RISC processors and CISC processors is that RISC processors are pipelined, and
have a small, simple, and highly regular instruction sets. RISC processors are also called load/store processors with
the only memory access operations being load and store. All data processing operations are register?to?register.
CISC processors tend to have irregular instruction sets, special purpose registers, complex instruction
interpretation hardware and memory to memory operations. However, the difference between modern RISC and
CISC processors is blurred and the distinction is no longer as significant as it was. RISC techniques have been
applied to CISC processors and even traditional complex instruction set processors are highly pipelined. Equally,
some RISC processors have quite complex instruction sets. One difference is that today’s RISC processors have not returned to memory?to?memory or memory?to?register instruction formats.