On 08/06/2020 05:26, Michael Moroney wrote:
> Gareth Evans  writes:
>
>> I was talking here recently of the possibility of a Dreadnought
>> 64-bit only language for the RPi, but it seems that I might
>> have been pipped at the post by the DEC Alpha.
>
>> As far as I can gather, the Alpha instruction set only
>> supported 64 and 32 bit variables.
>
>> Am I misinformed?
>
> EV4 and EV5 Alphas only supported 64 and 32 bit instructions.
>
> EV6 and EV7 Alphas did support 8 and 16 bit instructions.
>
The size of /instructions/ on the alpha was always 32 bits, the question
is the size of the data which integer arithmetic instructions handled.

All variants of the alpha only worked with 32 bit or 64 bit registers,
later version having some additional byte/word extension op codes. This
is broadly similar to ARMv8 which works on 32 bit or 64 bit registers
and has additional instructions for manipulating 8 bit and 16 bit data.

---druck

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05