Abstract
An accumulator instruction set architecture is simpler than an instruction set of a (reduced instruction set computer) RISC architecture. Therefore, an accumulator instruction set that does within one instruction less than a typical RISC instruction is probably more “reduced” than a standard load/store register based RISC architecture.
This paper presents Leros, an accumulator machine and its supporting C compiler. The hypothesis of the Leros instruction set architecture is that it can deliver the same performance as a RISC pipeline, but consumes less hardware and therefore also less power.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
The initial version of the processor has been designed on the island Leros: https://www.leros.gr/en/.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
No accumulator optimizations
- 5.
No constant registers
References
Altera Corporation: Nios II processor reference handbook, version NII5V1-11.0, May 2011. http://www.altera.com/literature/lit-nio2.jsp
Bachrach, J., et al.: Chisel: constructing hardware in a scala embedded language. In: The 49th Annual Design Automation Conference (DAC 2012), pp. 1216–1225. ACM, San Francisco, June 2012
Danecek, J., Drapal, F., Pluhacek, A., Salcic, Z., Servit, M.: DOP-a simple processor for custom computing machines. J. Microcomput. Appl. 17(3), 239–253 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1006/jmca.1994.1015
EEMBC: Coremark - an EEMBC benchmark (2018). https://www.eembc.org/coremark/. Accessed 12 Dec 2018
EEMBC: Coremark benchmark score - stmicroelectronics stm32l053 (2018). https://www.eembc.org/benchmark/reports/benchreport.php?suite=CORE&bench_scores=1689. Accessed 12 Dec 2018
Gaisler, J.: A portable and fault-tolerant microprocessor based on the SPARC v8 architecture. In: DSN 2002, Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, p. 409. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA (2002). http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/DSN.2002.1028926
Gwennap, L.: Esperanto makes out RISC-V. Technical report, The Linley Group, Microprocessor Report, December (2018)
Hempel, G., Hochberger, C.: A resource optimized processor core for FPGA based SoCs. In: Kubatova, H. (ed.) Proceedings of the 10th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD 2007), pp. 51–58. IEEE (2007)
Hennessy, J.L.: VLSI processor architecture. IEEE Trans. Comput. C–33(12), 1221–1246 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.1984.1676395
Lattner, C., Adve, V.S.: LLVM: a compilation framework for lifelong program analysis & transformation. In: International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO 2004), pp. 75–88. IEEE Computer Society (2004)
Nakatsuka, H., Tanaka, Y., Chu, T.V., Takamaeda-Yamazaki, S., Kise, K.: Ultrasmall: the smallest MIPS soft processor. In: 2014 24th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), pp. 1–4, September 2014. https://doi.org/10.1109/FPL.2014.6927387
Patterson, D.A.: Reduced instruction set computers. Commun. ACM 28(1), 8–21 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1145/2465.214917
Patterson, D.A., Sequin, C.H.: RISC I: a reduced instruction set VLSI computer. In: Proceedings of the 8th Annual Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA 1981, pp. 443–457. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1981)
Petersen, M.B.: A compiler backend and toolchain for the leros architecture. B.Sc. Engineering thesis, Technical University of Denmark (2019)
Robinson, J., Vafaee, S., Scobbie, J., Ritche, M., Rose, J.: The supersmall soft processor. In: 2010 VI Southern Programmable Logic Conference (SPL), pp. 3–8, March 2010. https://doi.org/10.1109/SPL.2010.5483016
Schoeberl, M.: Leros: a tiny microcontroller for FPGAs. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL 2011), pp. 10–14. IEEE Computer Society, Chania, September 2011
Schoeberl, M.: Digital Design with Chisel. TBD V 0.1 (2018). https://github.com/schoeberl/chisel-book
Schoeberl, M.: Lipsi: probably the smallest processor in the world. In: Berekovic, M., Buchty, R., Hamann, H., Koch, D., Pionteck, T. (eds.) ARCS 2018. LNCS, vol. 10793, pp. 18–30. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77610-1_2
Waterman, A.: Design of the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Ph.D. thesis, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, January 2016
Weicker, R.P.: Dhrystone: a synthetic systems programming benchmark. Commun. ACM (1984). https://doi.org/10.1145/358274.358283
Xilinx: PicoBlaze 8-bit embedded microcontroller user guide (2010)
Xilinx Inc.: MicroBlaze processor reference guide, version 9.0 (2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Schoeberl, M., Petersen, M.B. (2019). Leros: The Return of the Accumulator Machine. In: Schoeberl, M., Hochberger, C., Uhrig, S., Brehm, J., Pionteck, T. (eds) Architecture of Computing Systems – ARCS 2019. ARCS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11479. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18656-2_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18656-2_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-18655-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-18656-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)