The instruction setThe instruction setWe wanted to make the Wireworld computer as simple as we could while still being able to run worthwhile programs. We therefore settled on a highly orthogonal RISC architecture. The instruction set is as follows.
You may wonder how easy it can be to write a useful program using such an economical instruction set. Fortunately, some assistance is available: some of the registers behave in special ways, as described in the following table.
The instructions are stored in the registers themselves: the source and destination register numbers are coded as six bits each, and stored in the two halves of a sixteen bit value. The most significant two bits in each half are set to zero. The program counter (register R63) is incremented after each instruction is fetched, and thus the instructions that make up a program are written into consecutive registers. Each instruction cycle involves reading the source register involved in the instruction and then writing to the destination register. For efficiency, the next instruction is prefetched while the destination register is being written, and hence there is one branch delay slot. The adder features ‘end-around carry’, which means that negative numbers are represented using ones’ complement notation rather than the more usual two’s complement. Next: the whole computer. <Previous page Wireworld index Next page> This page most recently updated Fri 5 Jan 10:25:33 GMT 2024 |
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