Re:Analyzing the complexity of various RISC/CISC architectures
by zozbot234 on Saturday December 31, 2022 @05:59PM
(#34201630)
Yes but RISC-V is very risc-y by the criteria Mashey proposes here. The one thing that arguably doesn't completely fit is the multiple insn sizes, and even then real-world RISC-V implementations have only two, at 2 or 4 bytes. That's still very low compared to historical CISC. And I think the atomic instructions do RMW to memory, but they carefully avoid complicated address modes; they even dispense with register+immediate offset.
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Re:Analyzing the complexity of various RISC/CISC architectures
by 33985868 on Saturday December 31, 2022 @06:56PM
(#34202036)
MIPS did it too with the MIPS16 extension (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture#Application-...)
Makes sense as a hardware designer to be able to pick a power- and space-efficient chip.
Mashey also had thoughts about that: https://yarchive.net/comp/mips16.html
Likewise for atomic operations: https://yarchive.net/comp/ll_sc.html
Re:Analyzing the complexity of various RISC/CISC architectures
by Tuna-Fish on Saturday December 31, 2022 @09:09PM
(#34202861)
> The one thing that arguably doesn't completely fit is the multiple insn sizes, and even then real-world RISC-V implementations have only two, at 2 or 4 bytes.
They will have a third very soon. The encoding space for 4-byte instructions is almost spent.