Instruction Set - Instruction Set Implementation

Instruction Set Implementation

Any given instruction set can be implemented in a variety of ways. All ways of implementing an instruction set give the same programming model, and they all are able to run the same binary executables. The various ways of implementing an instruction set give different tradeoffs between cost, performance, power consumption, size, etc.

When designing the microarchitecture of a processor, engineers use blocks of "hard-wired" electronic circuitry (often designed separately) such as adders, multiplexers, counters, registers, ALUs etc. Some kind of register transfer language is then often used to describe the decoding and sequencing of each instruction of an ISA using this physical microarchitecture. There are two basic ways to build a control unit to implement this description (although many designs use middle ways or compromises):

1. Early computer designs and some of the simpler RISC computers "hard-wired" the complete instruction set decoding and sequencing (just like the rest of the microarchitecture).
2. Other designs employ microcode routines and/or tables to do this—typically as on chip ROMs and/or PLAs (although separate RAMs have been used historically).

There are also some new CPU designs which compile the instruction set to a writable RAM or flash inside the CPU (such as the Rekursiv processor and the Imsys Cjip), or an FPGA (reconfigurable computing). The Western Digital MCP-1600 is an older example, using a dedicated, separate ROM for microcode.

An ISA can also be emulated in software by an interpreter. Naturally, due to the interpretation overhead, this is slower than directly running programs on the emulated hardware, unless the hardware running the emulator is an order of magnitude faster. Today, it is common practice for vendors of new ISAs or microarchitectures to make software emulators available to software developers before the hardware implementation is ready.

Often the details of the implementation have a strong influence on the particular instructions selected for the instruction set. For example, many implementations of the instruction pipeline only allow a single memory load or memory store per instruction, leading to a load-store architecture (RISC). For another example, some early ways of implementing the instruction pipeline led to a delay slot.

The demands of high-speed digital signal processing have pushed in the opposite direction—forcing instructions to be implemented in a particular way. For example, in order to perform digital filters fast enough, the MAC instruction in a typical digital signal processor (DSP) must be implemented using a kind of Harvard architecture that can fetch an instruction and two data words simultaneously, and it requires a single-cycle multiply–accumulate multiplier.