Risc V greatly underperforms

[Niels Möller]

Laurent Desnogues <laurent.desnogues at gmail.com> writes:

> This is not completely correct: as soon as you have an out of order
> micro architecture with register renaming, you'll have to add hardware
> to also rename flags, so it's not 100% free.

There's a cost to having multiple outputs from the same instruction, so
I can see some attraction in eliminating the carry flag (similar reasons
that some architectures prefers a mulhi instructions over a "widening
mul" instruction with two output registers). Additional inputs, e.g.,
two operands + carry in, is less of a problem than additional outputs.

But if one designs the instruction set that way, so that two
instructions are needed to get sum and carry out of two operands (or
both halves of a full product), one ought to make sure that those two
instructions can run in parallel. While on Risc V, it appears to take
two *depending* instructions.

(My toy architecture does have a single condition flag, which can be
used as carry, see https://git.lysator.liu.se/nisse/instr16).

Regards,
/Niels

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