Mill Computing, Inc. Forums The Mill Architecture Instruction Encoding Reply To: Instruction Encoding

Ivan Godard
Keymaster
Post count: 689

There are no jumps “within” an ebb; by definition ebbs can only be entered at the entry point.

Branch and call operations are flow side and (ignoring code pointers) contain a manifest signed 32-bit offset that uses normal flow-side manifest encoding (and so can occupy from zero to 32 bits in the encoding, depending on value). The offset is relative to the entry point address of the ebb containing the transfer operation.

Transfers using a code pointer take the pointer from the belt and transfer to the indicated address; there is no offset.

Ignoring misprediction, latency of all transfer operations is effectively zero; the cycle after the instruction that contained the transfer will issue the instruction at the target address. Thus a one-instruction loop (a common situation on wider Mills) executes an iteration every cycle.