The Art of Instruction Set Design

I will argue in this work that because of the flexibility offered by the field programmable devices, such as FPGA, the instruction set design becomes an essential part of designing digital systems of the future. There are advantages to experiment with microarchitecture and instruction set design to fit various applications. I will illustrate by a series of evolution of instruction set design for mobile devices. Driven by the mobile code requirement, the instruction set and microarchitecture of various alternatives are evaluated and compared. Some of the latest ideas will be described, including the evaluation of a proposed instruction set plus its micro-architecture.