Building a 32-Bit, One-Instruction Computer

Hugh Pickens writes "The advantages of RISC are well known mdash; simplifying the CPU core by reducing the complexity of the instruction set allows faster speeds, more registers, and pipelining to provide the appearance of single-cycle execution. Al Williams writes in Dr Dobbs about taking RISC to its logical conclusion by designing a functional computer called One-Der with only a single simple instruction mdash; a 32-bit Transfer Triggered Architecture (TTA) CPU that operates at roughly 10 MIPS. 'When I tell this story in person, people are usually squirming with the inevitable question: What's the one instruction?' writes Williams. 'It turns out there's several ways to construct a single instruction CPU, but the method I had stumbled on does everything via a move instruction (hence the name, "Transfer Triggered Architecture").' The CPU is implemented on a a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device and the prototype works on a 'Spartan 3 Starter Board' with an XS3C1000 device available from Digilent that has the equivalent of about 1,000,000 logic gates costing between $100 and $200. 'Applications that can benefit from custom instruction in hardware mdash; things like digital signal processing, for example mdash; are ideal for One-Der since you can implement parts of your algorithm in hardware and then easily integrate those parts with the CPU.'"pa href="http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/11/19/1845205/Building-a-32-Bit-One-Instruction-Computer?from=rss"img src="http://developers.slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/11/19/1845205"/a/ppa href="http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/11/19/1845205/Building-a-32-Bit-One-Instruction-Computer?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mxxnLGovIw2UZlHjIFvQSbZRTw0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mxxnLGovIw2UZlHjIFvQSbZRTw0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mxxnLGovIw2UZlHjIFvQSbZRTw0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mxxnLGovIw2UZlHjIFvQSbZRTw0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/yBHFwC5yVTk" height="1" width="1"/

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