Essentials of Computer Organization and Architecture, 5th Edition

5.6   REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES OF ISAs

Let’s look at the two architectures we discussed in Chapter 4, Intel and MIPS, to see how the designers of these processors chose to deal with the issues introduced in this chapter: instruction formats, instruction types, number of operands, addressing, and pipelining. We’ll also introduce the Java Virtual Machine to illustrate how software can create an ISA abstraction that completely hides the real ISA of the machine. Finally, we introduce the ARM architecture, one you may not have heard of but most likely use every day.

5.6.1   Intel

Intel uses a little endian, two-address architecture, with variable-length instructions. Intel processors use a register-memory architecture, which means that all instructions ...