A dominant architecture: 80x86
See your textbook for a more detailed description
Complexity:
- Instructions from 1 to 17 bytes long
- one operand must act as both a source and destination
- one operand can come from memory
- complex addressing modes e.g., “base or scaled index with 8 or 32 bit displacement”
Saving grace:
- the most frequently used instructions are not too difficult to build
- compilers avoid the portions of the architecture that are slow