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The vast vast majority of CPUs shipped in the world do not have register renaming. But even with it, as you say, that's just expanding a 5 bit architectural reg
by brucehoult 3y ago
The vast vast majority of CPUs shipped in the world do not have register renaming. But even with it, as you say, that's just expanding a 5 bit architectural register field to a 6 to 8 bit logical register field.
There are zero currently shipping commercially-produced RISC-V CPUs that do instruction-fusing -- and we know more than 10 billion cores had been shipped as at this time last year.
The three or four companies currently designing RISC-V CPUs intended to be competitive with current or near-current x86 and Apple are of course making 8-wide (or so) OoO cores, and they say they are implementing some instruction fusion.
Those will be available in two or three years perhaps, and will get a lot of publicity, but they will be a tiny minority of RISC-V cores shipped, just as Cortex-A and Cortex-X are a tiny minority of Arm's.
- hajile 3y agoMy point is that this is a uarch decision rather than something fundamental to RISC-V itself. If you want high performance, that idea doesn’t hold. This is like arguing that RISC-V doesn’t need advanced branch predictors because MCUs done need them.