Determining hardware complexity of software operations

Posted at 10:00 am on 03/07/2000 by Dr. Rahul Razdan

A new class of general purpose computers called Programmable Reduced Instruction Set Computers (PRISC) use RISC techniques a basis for operation. In addition to the conventional RISC instructions, PRISC computers provide hardware programmable resources which can be configured optimally for a given user application. A given user application is compiled using a PRISC compiler which recognizes and evaluates complex instructions into a Boolean expression which is assigned an identifier and stored in conventional memory. The recognition of instructions which may be programmed in hardware is achieved through a combination of bit width analysis and instruction optimization. During execution of the user application on the PRISC computer, the stored expressions are loaded as needed into a programmable functional unit. Once loaded, the expressions are executed during a single instruction cycle (Full Patent Here).


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