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> Many details of an ISA extend beyond the instruction decoder. For instance, the RISC-V ISA mandates specific behavior for its integer division instruction, wh
by shash 2y ago
> Many details of an ISA extend beyond the instruction decoder. For instance, the RISC-V ISA mandates specific behavior for its integer division instruction, which has to return a specific value on division by zero, unlike most other ISAs which trap on division by zero; and the NaN-boxing scheme it uses for single-precision floating point in double-precision registers can be found AFAIK nowhere else. The x86 ISA is infamous for having a stronger memory ordering than other common ISAs. Many ISAs have a flags register, which can be set by most arithmetic (and some non-arithmetic) instructions. And that's all for the least-privileged mode; the supervisor or hypervisor modes expose many more details which differ greatly depending on the ISA.
All quite true, and to that, add things like cache hints and other hairy bits in an actual processor.