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In article <1990Feb10.154033.4271@mentor.com> franka@mntgfx.UUCP (Frank A. Adrian) writes:
>In article <7366@pdn.paradyne.com> alan@oz.paradyne.com (Alan Lovejoy) writes:
>>BMERGE Rd, Rs, Rm; Rd = (Rd & ~Rm) | (Rs & Rm)
>
>Instead of your proposed SPLICE instruction, I'd recommend a
>BITEXT instruction which (using your notation, but where
>[x:y] means bit indexing) looks like:
>
>BITEXT Rd, Rs, Rdescr; Rd = Rs[Rdescr[11:6] : Rdescr[5:0]] >> Rdescr[5:0]
>
>I believe the AMD 29K had a similar pair of instructions.

BMERGE, BITEXT (bitfield extract), a bitfield extract with sign-
extension and a bitfield insert instns can all be useful though
the 29K does not have any of these.  It does have `extract' that
concatenates its two src operands into one 64 bit string, shifts
it left by some amount (less than 32, stored in a special
register) and sticks the *high* order bits in the dst reg.  For
example:

	   A        B
	12345678 9abcdef0
	     |||/////
	     6789abcd           C = ((A // B) << 12)[63:32]

			       where // is the concatenate operator

This is quite a versatile instn.  By making either A or B all
zeroes you can extract the top or bottom N bits.  If A & B are the
same register, you have a rotate by N instn.  By using succesive
registers in a sequence of extracts you can move an arbitrarily
long bitstring.  For example, to shift a 96 bit string left by 12
bits, you do the following:

	mtsr    FC, 12  ; funnelshift count = 12
    ; lr10 = 0, lr11,lr12,lr13 = the 96 bit string
	extract lr10, lr10, lr11
	extract lr11, lr11, lr12
	extract lr12, lr12, lr13
    ; lr10//lr11//lr12 = ((lr10//lr11//lr12//lr13) << 12)[127:32]

The last one is very handy for moving bitmaps around (large
bitmaps can be moved at about 3 cycles / 32 bits, assuming memory
can sustain single cycle access in page/static-column mode).

But extract is not ideal for bitfield operations (extracting /
inserting middle bits of a word will take about 4 instns).
Though, I do think it is possible to do bitfield{extract,extract-
wtih-sign-extend,insert} in single cycle -- the 29k already does
something similar for bytes.

>BTW, does anyone have an instruction format which uses the
>source register specifiers as an immediate small constant
>instead of a register specifier?

The 29K does.

-- Bakul Shah ..!{ames,sun,ucbvax,uunet}!amdcad!light!bvs