How to design a computer instruction set
Nenad Marovac · ITNOW · 1983
Abstract Computers and their organisation, architecture, and implementational technology have evolved considerably during the last 25 years. Some changes were revolutionary jumps assisted by vlsi technology. To the ‘slow’ computer with programmable i/o and one central control, we have added dma, interrupts, multiple processing units, parallelism, and more recently, the distribution of processing and control; we have also introduced object-oriented architectures. Throughout this time, computer instruction sets have changed little. They have not matured because we have not attained the necessary maturity to express the objectives for a computer instruction set and then follow a sequence of systematic steps to design and implement such a set.