By whygee on Tuesday 6 January 2009, 17:49 - Architecture

As the execution units mature and get integrated as one block, things become clear, at least concerning the computation instructions. I'm currently focusing on the 16-bit flavour of YASEP and I expect that the following will hold true for YASEP32.

The ALU16 is nearing completion, though feature creep is still rampant. But I have identified a bunch of instructions that will not change much in the future, and they are gathered here :

- ROP2 : AND, OR, XOR, ANDN, ORN, XNOR, NAND, NOR
- ASU : ADD, SUB, ADDS1, SUBB1, ADDS2, SUBS2, MIN, MAX
- SHL : SHR, SHL, ROR, ROL, SAR  + MUL : MUL8L, MUL8H, MULINIT
- IE : MOV, SB, LSB, LZB (16/32b) SH, SHH, LSH, LZH (32 bits only)

This nice and square table represents the large majority of the used instructions, and this fits into 4 groups of 8 instead of the planned 8 groups. So...

This saves a bit that is used to encode other addressing modes. In 2008, there were 2 modes : short mode (RR) and long mode (RRImm16). Now, it is also possible to encode a short immediate in the short mode (RImm4, the register is replaced by a value), or use another register as a destination in the long mode (but 12 bits are unused).

Yes there are now 4 addressing modes and most code should feel their binary size shrink ! Furthermore, the datapath complexity is not impacted and the 3-registers version should reduce the number of cycles for a given portion of code.

How this affects usual code :

- add 1, r1 ==> r1 += 1

now takes 2 bytes instead of 4. The constant can range from -8 to +7.

- add r1, r2, r3 ==> r1 = r2 + r3

It takes 4 bytes as previously but it saves 1 clock cycle, compared to

- mov r2, r1
- add r3, r1

Note that the yasep.org site is not yet updated, I'll wait until things
settle down.

20200407:

ADDS1, SUBB1, ADDS2, SUBS2 have been replaced by CMPS & CMPI.

This log describes a significant enhancement to the core, which led to create "instruction forms" and, in turn, the increase of complexity of the assembler, disassembler and other stuff... Good for code compactness, but sometimes it got hard to manage...