Energy efficient special instruction support in an embedded processor with compact isa
Dongrui She, Yifan He, Henk Corporaal · 2012
The use of special instructions that execute complex operation patterns is a common approach in application specific processor design to improve performance and efficiency. However, in an embedded generic processor with compact instruction set architecture (ISA), such instructions may lead to large overhead as: i) more bits are needed to encode the extra opcodes and operands, resulting in wider instructions; ii) more register file (RF) ports are required to provide the extra operands to the function units. Such overhead may increase energy consumption considerably.