Image Number 12 for United States Patent #5680637.
A RISC processor is arranged to reduce a code size, make the hardware less complicated, execute a plurality of operations for one machine cycle, and enhance the performance. The processor is capable of executing N instruction each having a short word length for indicating a single operation or an instruction having a long word length for indicating M (N<M) operations. When the number of operations to be executed in parallel is large, the long-word instruction is used. When it is small, the short-word instruction is used. A competition between the long-word instructions is detected by hardware and a competition between the short-word instructions only is detected by software. The simplification of the hardware brings about improvement of a machine cycle, improvement of a code cache hit ratio caused by the reduction of a code size and increase of the number of operations to be executed in parallel for the purpose of enhancing the performance.
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