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Instruction Encoding
Instructions are encoded in little endian byte and word order as shown in the following diagram:
Figure 2 – Instruction Encoding for Crusoe
Instructions in both the ALU0 and ALU1 slots may have an 8-bit signed immediate instead of register rb; the ALU1 slot may optionally use a 32-bit immediate, but only in appropriate bundle types. All instructions (except branches) have a 9-bit opcode field. All opcodes share a common mapping into this 9-bit space, even though not all instructions can execute on all functional units.
The hardware is designed to interlock all operations through scoreboarding, however as described in the observations section, design flaws sometimes prevent the microprocessor from taking full advantage of these features.
The ALU0|imm32 and ALU0|ALU1 bundle types share the same format code (10) but the ALU1 slot is interpreted as an imm32 depending on the opcode:
11xxxx011: 32-bit immediate in place of ALU1
All others: execute ALU1 as instruction
If the 11xxxx011 pattern appears in an ALU1 slot, an 8-bit immediate is used instead. It is not clear why this encoding is sometimes used instead of the normal 8-bit immediate form.
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