Re:Major Changes at RISC-V Designer SiFive
by fidotron on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @08:35AM
(#37998257)
I believe Qualcomm are proposing dropping 16 bit instruction support, exactly like Aarch64.
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Re:Major Changes at RISC-V Designer SiFive
by mort96 on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @09:47AM
(#37999126)
You seem to be right. I had interpreted some other responses in this thread to mean that Qualcomm has their own alternative 16-bit encoding that doesn't have the 32-bit instruction alignment issue, but it seems like they instead have a whole bunch of new 32-bit instructions which have memory operands and a bunch of addressing modes.
I see now what you mean by posing this as a conflict between ISA purists (only provide load/store all other instructions have register or immediate operands, only provide one store and one load instruction, add compressed instructions to combat binary bloat) and ISA pragmatists (add new special-case instructions with memory operands and useful addressing modes).