32-bit barrel shifters consume significant area and RISC-V was developed to support resource constrained low cost embedded hardware in a minimal ISA implementation.

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pezezin 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The 32-bit ARM architecture included a barrel shifter as part of its basic design, as in every instruction had a shift field.

If a CPU built in 1985 with a grand total of 26 000 transistors could afford it, I am pretty sure that anything built in this century could afford it too.

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snvzz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

26k is a lot of transistors for an embedded MCU.

You'd be excluding many small CPUs which exist within other chips running very specialized code.

As profiles mandate these instructions anyway, there's no good reason to complicate the most basic RISC-V possible.

RISC-V is the ISA for everything, from the smallest such CPUs to supercomputers.

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wk_end 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What MCUs are you thinking of?

To the best of my knowledge (and Google-fu), 26K really isn't a lot of transistors for an embedded MCU - at least not a fully-featured 32-bit one comparable to a minimal RISC-V core. An ARM Cortex M0, which is pretty much the smallest thing out there, is around 10K gates => around 40K transistors. This is also around the same size as a minimal RISC-V core AFAICT.

The ARM core has a shifter, though.

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snvzz an hour ago | parent [-]

There's reason RV32E and RV64E, with half the registers, are a thing. RV32I/RV64I isn't small enough.

There are many chips in the market that do embed 8051s for janitorial tasks, because it is small and not legally encumbered. Some chips have several non-exposed tiny embedded CPUs within.

RISC-V is replacing many of these, bringing modern tooling. There's even open source designs like SERV that fit in a corner of an already small FPGA, leaving room for other purposes.

	▲	wk_end an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count, even an 8051 has 50K transistors, which reinforces my claim that 26K really doesn't seem like a big ask for an MCU core. Whether that means a barrel shifter is worth it or not is a totally orthogonal question, of course. (Although I do have to eat my words here - I didn't check that Wikipedia page, and it does actually list a ~6K RISC-V core! It's an experimental academic prototype "made from a two-dimensional material [...] crafted from molybdenum disulfide"; I don't know if that construction might allow for a more efficient transistor count and it's totally impractical - 1KHz clock speed, 1-bit ALU, etc. - for almost any purpose, but it is technically a RISC-V implementation significantly smaller than 26K)
	▲	adgjlsfhk1 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> There's reason RV32E and RV64E, with half the registers, are a thing. RV32I/RV64I isn't small enough. This is actually kind of counter to your point. The really tiny micro-controllers from the 80s only had 224 bits of registers. RV32E is at least twice that (16 registers*32 bits), and modern mcus generally use 2-4kbs of sram, so the overhead of a 32 bit barrel shifter is pretty minimal.

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adgjlsfhk1 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IIUC this is a lot less true in the modern era. Even with 24nm transistors (the cheapest transistor last time I checked), modern microcontrollers have a fairly big transistor budget for the core (since 80+% of the transistors are going to sram anyway).

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jacquesm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can save a lot of silicon by doing 8 or 16 bit shifters and then doing the rest at the code generation level. Not having any seems really anemic to me.