Viewing instruction set design as an optimization problem
Bruce K. Holmer, Alvin M. Despain · 1991
This paper reviews past attempts to systematize in-struction set design and offers an alternative approach. Our technique is based on compaction of microopera-tions to form instructions. The compaction is done in such a way as to optimize a metric which is a function of cycle count, code size, and instruction set size. To illus-trate our technique, optimal instruction sets are derived for data structure creation in Prolog. 1