I am studying computing  as part of my A level course, and my understanding is that all instructions in a RISC architecture should execute in roughtly the same, small number of clock cycles (ideally one).This leads me to ask how multiplying two (possible very large) numbers takes (roughly) the same time as all the other commands, such as LOAD, STORE, ADD, etc.I believe the most common way a computer multiplies numbers is using a Binary Multiplier, which requires multiple addition executions, meaning that a multiplication, or PROD command (from an example from Stanford University) will execute with many cycles per second and not be consistent with the speed/cycles of other commands from a reduced instruction set.
MULT in a RISC - should instructions take the same amount of time in a RISC system
computer architecture;cpu