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Re:RISC-V announces first new specifications of 2022 adding ... by crest on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @12:41PM (#31826010)
Are there really (enough) RISC V cores having no microcode sequencer at all and would have to add one just to implement a 1 bit per cycle microcoded divide instruction?
Re:RISC-V announces first new specifications of 2022 adding ... by bpye on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @01:37PM (#31826812)
I can’t think of many RISC-V cores that are microcode sequenced. There are some toy implementations using ucode - but I can’t think of any that have seen serious use.

Maybe you’d count SERV?

Re:RISC-V announces first new specifications of 2022 adding ... by monocasa on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @02:35PM (#31827408)
If you take a step back and define the concept in question as 'cores that have pipeline stages that can block the pipeline as they work their way through a core local state machine (whether that state machine is encoded in a table form via microcode or via a sea of logic)', then there's quite a few on the low end for multiply support. Remember that RV32EM is competing with Cortex-M0, which can get down to 12k gates when it has an iterative, bit-serial multiply.
Re:RISC-V announces first new specifications of 2022 adding ... by bpye on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @03:16PM (#31827917)
Whilst true for multiply, divide is considerably more complex. You have to step up to the M3 to get a divide instruction on the ARM side. This is why the new Zmmul is valuable over the existing M extension.
Re:RISC-V announces first new specifications of 2022 adding ... by monocasa on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @03:24PM (#31828028)
Agreed, but the point was that state machine, iterative, blocking pipeline stages are pretty common even in RISC cores, including particularly ascetic RISC-V and ARM cores. But I can get how at ~12k gates you don't even want the slowest iterative divide unit.