4 ms·
I read that the hardware required to decode an x86 instruction isn’t actually that bad (potentially less than certain other fixed width encodings). The problem
by dan-robertson 3y ago
I read that the hardware required to decode an x86 instruction isn’t actually that bad (potentially less than certain other fixed width encodings). The problem is that it is hard to decode several instructions from the stream at once
- sweetjuly 3y agoThis is a problem we know how to solve though. Techniques like predecoding and to a greater extent uop caches mean that you only have to do the harder parts of decode on (relatively) rare misses. On hits, you can avoid the entire problem since you already have this information stored or abstracted away.