A RISC CPU in Excel [video]

  • He designs a stack-based ISA with ten instructions.

    I've previously written [1] about reducing RISC-V RV32I down to 10 instructions `addi`, `add`, `nand`, `sll`, `sra`, `jal`, `jalr`, `blt`, `lw`, `sw` [2]. Except for subword stores the missing instructions can be emulated with at most 4 instructions.

    I implemented the `countPrimes` function in my own benchmark [3] using just this subset [4] and found a 28% code size expansion but only a 3% speed penalty.

    [1] https://new.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/w0iufg/how_much_coul...

    [2] or 11 if you keep a strict subset by including `and` and `xor` instead of `nand`

    [3] https://hoult.org/primes.txt

    [4] https://hoult.org/primes.S