The old bipolar (IIL) Signetics 8x300 had only 8 instructions, so it was definitely a RISC. Of course some of the instructions were quite powerful. IIRC, it could fetch a byte, and it with one quantity, OR it with another, and XOR the result with a third, shift/rotate it a bit one way or the other, then write it to some destination, all in one stroke. The CPU had no internal resources to speak of, other than an ALU and execution unit. Look up the old beastie, check out its environment, and then compare what it could do in its 250 ns cycle time as opposed to what any of the 805x's can do in 250 ns. It may surprise you! You'll have to excuse its lack of bells and whistles, though. It did use external code and data memory, despite its Harvard architecture.

RE