On Monday 17 April 2006 23:04, Nicolas Boulay wrote: > Le samedi 15 Avril 2006 17:27, Lourens Veen a écrit : > > Newer processors can simply have more > > functional units, and could be backwards compatible with their > > predecessors. > > One of the backside of MISC is that you can't be backwards > compatible. You needs more space to define new register. You need to > define different latency. Basicaly the instruction world look like a > 2 registers, one read, one write. You could add a bit to the input > register for immediat numbers. If you use 64 registers, it take 6 > bits.
You are right, I hadn't thought of that. If there were room for extensibility in the opcode format, and you didn't improve upon the functional units themselves, it could be made backward compatible, but as you say, it's not necessary. Lourens
pgpU5K6Zr7GB0.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
