It's also very common in older ISAs, especially DSPs. As pointed out elsewhere, it's common in VLIWs (which is generally "older" ISAs). A good example is the M

It's also very common in older ISAs, especially DSPs. As pointed out elsewhere, it's common in VLIWs (which is generally "older" ISAs). A good example is the Motorola 56K DSP family. Instructions are 24 bit wide (24 bit wide memory!). They come in a few formats, which can be broken down into two major types: complex instruction, or simple instruction plus up to 2 memory moves and address updates. It's basically designed around performing a single-cycle 24x24->56b multiple-accumulate with two memory reads and address increments, with zero loop overhead. The rest of the ISA really, really suffers for it :) But it's impressive when it's doing exactly what it was designed to do! It's a great example of a domain-specific ISA. Also worth noting that in 56K, there is no score-boarding or other dependency tracking to automatically insert pipeline bubbles. That's the job of the hand-writer/assembler/compiler. If you get it wrong, it simply does something undefined. It's "fun" when this happen.