Designing a trivial CPU, part 3: high level hardware
Go to the first post in this series. Introduction In the first two parts of this series, I talked about picking the instruction set for my trivial processor. So far, however, I haven’t mentioned how the processor actually works to execute those instructions. In the next few posts, I’m going to talk about the design and control of the circuitry in the processor. The Loop As I mentioned in part 1, the texts I’ve read have omitted several important steps in describing a CPU, and this is the first one of those.Designing a trivial CPU, part 2: machine code
Go to the first post in this series.
Introduction
I’m designing a small CPU. In the last post, I picked (fairly
arbitrarily) bit-size, registers, addressing modes, and an instruction
set. To recap, that’s: 8 bits; four registers (x, y, i and j);
four additional indirect modes ((i), (j), k and (k)), where
k is an 8-bit constant.