RISC-V and Floating Point

(fprox.substack.com)

6 points | by hasheddan 5 hours ago

1 comments

  • Netch 5 hours ago
    From a bystanderʼs POV it is excessively hard to memorize all the mess with multiple different extensions. The naming style doesnʼt alleviate the task. But this is a typical issue in the whole RISC-V ecosystem.

    What Iʼm slightly confused for is that all these extensions, useful for a minor part of applications, arenʼt moved to longer instructions (6-byte).

    • camel-cdr 2 hours ago
      > From a bystanderʼs POV it is excessively hard to memorize all the mess with multiple different extensions

      It's the same for other ISAs.

      > What Iʼm slightly confused for is that all these extensions, useful for a minor part of applications, arenʼt moved to longer instructions (6-byte).

      Because these instructions don't need it. There will be future >4-byte instructions, for things thay can't resonably be done in 4-bytes, e.g. much larger immediates.