[Libre-soc-dev] results of phone call about simple-v prefix

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On 11/28/20, Richard Wilbur <richard.wilbur at gmail.com> wrote:


> I think I feel your pain, Luke!  That is a particularly beautiful thing to
> have in your architecture—and particularly heart-breaking to lose.
> Especially in light of context-switching efficiency and the hoops other
> architectures have jumped through to achieve it!  I am thinking of SPARC
> with register windows (also on i960, IA_64, 29k) into a built-in register
> stack[*] versus separate push/pop per register.
>
> Looks like I need to read up in the list archives to understand why we would
> consider dropping those instructions.

the priority is on what's suitable for 3D and Video / Audio decode
rather than on what's good for general-purpose computing.

the latter requires us to define new ABIs, get them approved by the
OpenPOWER Foundation and implement them in binutils, gcc and llvm -
all as mainline.

l.