forwardcom forum

Out of curiosity - where do you plan to put the six option bits? In the instruction word (that would equal 64 different opcodes)? Or in an extra operand? In MRISC32 I have four bitwise instructions: OR, AND, XOR and SEL. The OR, AND and XOR instructions have two control bits in the instruction word ...

I don't know how it would be implemented. That's what makes it interesting 😉 Like with most engineering tasks, you'll find a solution if you set your mind to it. I think that I'd approach the problem by assuming that there are a few properties of a string that are very useful in common string operat...

It would be interesting to make a "string machine" that is optimized for applications that are heavy on string processing. You would probably want new hardware backed string types, and you'd need compiler/language support. For instance some applications (e.g. Firefox IIRC) use a neat trick...

JoeDuarte wrote: Is there any advantage to treating chars/strings as a basic type in an ISA, instead of treating them as integers? No, you can treat them as 8-bit integers if you use UTF-8 or as 16-bit integers for UTF-16. Anyway, human-readable text strings are rarely so long that execution time b...

Your solutions sound good. However I have one problem left, and that is that I really want to avoid having more than two source operands per instruction. The only exception in my current ISA is memory store, which takes data + base address + offset/stride, which I reccon is a reasonable exception be...

Hi, Cool to see people taking interest in my project. While I agree that there are many similarities between ForwardCom and MRISC32, I think we have slightly different goals. Whereas ForwardCom is an attempt to design a robust, forward looking ISA, my own work with MRISC32 is mostly an attempt to le...