29 Jan
2011
29 Jan
'11
1:37 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
IIRC, the Transputer is just plain weird here. You have to build up the
instruction in an internal register before you exexute it (there are
opcodes that modify this instruction register in various ways). I think
the most common instructions can be loaded in 1 byte.
It's rather different to the multi-byte instructions on otehr processor
anyway.
-tony
Are you implying that the data registers should
be variable length, or
that a variable number of bits should be used in each instruction?
The only processor I've ever seen for which instructions are a variable
number of bits (not bytes or words) is the Intel iAPX 432. For the
release 1 GDP, instructions ranged from 6 to 344 bits long.