• ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    18 days ago

    I see it as the number of possible instructions.

    As in, 8 bit 8085 had 28 possible instructions, 32 bit ones had 232 and already had enough possible combinations that we couldn’t come up with enough functions to fill the provided space.

    CC BY-NC-SA

    • wewbull@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      18 days ago

      So “instruction encoding length”.

      I don’t think that works though. For something like RISC-V, RV64 has a maximum 32-bit instruction encoding. For x86-64 those original 8-bit intructions still exist, and take up a huge part of the encoding space, cutting the number of n-bit instructions to more like 2^(n-7)

      • ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        18 days ago

        RV64 has a maximum 32-bit instruction encoding

        I kinda expected that to happen, since there’s already enough to fit all required functions. So yeah, even this is not a good enough criteria for bit rating.

        those original 8-bit intructions still exist, and take up a huge part of the encoding space, cutting the number of n-bit instructions to more like 2^(n-7)

        err… they are still instructions, right? And they are implemented. I don’t see why you would negate that from the number of instructions.