I've committed the PC-relative branch instruction changes upstream. But this is just one of many ISA improvements that need to happen. Here are a handful of other ideas off the top of my head. None of these projects should be particularly difficult.
- Shorten load/store offsets to 16-bits. They are currently 32-bits, but for all of the benchmarks I've looked at the upper 16-bits are always 0x0000 or 0xffff. If the compiler ever really wants to use an offset > 16-bits, it should revert to computing the target address in registers. I don't expect that much code would require this.
- Introduce shift instructions with immediate operands. There's plenty of opcode space for us to add 16-bit shift instructions that include a 5-bit immediate shift value (so we can shift up to 32-bits in either direction). Right now we load a 32-bit immediate shift value into a register which burns that register as well as wastes 32-bits of code space per shift.
- Get the compiler to generate 16-bit immediate loads. All immediates are 32-bits right now, but the vast majority of these constants are < 16 bits long.
- Push/pop multiple registers to the stack with one instruction. Although we have 16-registers, the ABI doesn't have us pushing all 16 to the stack on function entry. We should be able to have a single 16-bit instruction that pushes/pops all of the relevant registers in one go. The instruction would include a bitmap identifying the registers we need to push/pop. ARM has something like this. The only drawback I can think of is that it could increase interrupt latencies as we'd probably have to retire the entire instruction (~10 memory writes/reads) before servicing an interrupt.
- Many register rich ISAs include one register that is hardwired to
zero. We could try this to see if it makes a difference, but I doubt
it would be a win. Another idea would be to create a
cmpzinstruction to compare a register to zero so we don't have to burn a register for this common operation. Maybe cmp1 might even make sense. This is easy to measure.
Those are some of the obvious ones, and all I have time to write about now.