[J-core] [RFC] SIMD extention for J-Core

[Rob Landley]

On 10/29/2017 10:37 PM, Ken Phillis Jr wrote:
> Information on the SH-3 Is not exactly sparse,

We've noticed.

> This processor has 3 main versions:
> SH-3: The Feature added in this is MMU Instructions, and these are
> generally in the System Control Instructions

Yeah, that. Except Jeff decided not to use their MMU design because it
takes up an unreasonable amount of space in an FPGA (more than doubling
the size of the SOC). And we already backported sh3's barrel shift
instructions, most of the rest of the instructions they added were for
fiddling with the TLB or doing the DSP/FPU stuff.

So j3 is adding _an_ MMU, but not necessarily the sh3 mmu. I'll see if
we can get more detail posted about the j3 mmu design next month.

> SH-3E: the SH-3 Instructions with 32-bit Floating Point Instructions
> and registers added.

The problem is 32 bit floating point instructions aren't hugely useful,
everything interesting's a double. (Even printf("%f") is specced to take
a double argument, not a float.) So when we do an FPU, we're most likely
to jump straight to the 64 bit version (with maybe a compile time option
to strip it down to 32 bits, but we'll see).

> SH3-DSP Core: SH-3 Instructions with Arithmetic DSP Instructions
> added. In general these are mostly for Integer and fixed point math.

I'm pretty sure we're not doing that. (I vaguely recall looking at that
trying to find j64 instruction space, but those had _already_ been
repurposed by later superh processors. I.E. even later superh didn't
respect that, and we needed to support the "not that" uses of that
instruction space in j64...)

I think. Ask me again next week, the notes and people who wrote them are
in tokyo. :)

(That said, we may wind up adding another simple DSP to the DMA engine.
Maybe something 8-bit and capable of driving ethernet checksumming, PTP,
handling the mmc bus state engine... But that's not part of historical
superh.)

> Also, To see a comparison of the SH1, SH2, SH3, and SH4 lines of
> chips, you can find the instruction set summary for these at:
> HTML: http://www.shared-ptr.com/sh_insns.html

Which is the second link at the top of the j-core.org page, and looking
through a printout of that is how I was finding instructions to
potentially repurpose for j64 last year. (Which I then pointed the
actual engineers at so they could do the real research, I was just
finding candidates.)

> Github: https://github.com/shared-ptr/sh_insns
> 
> 
> Also, You can find the Programmers manual for the SH3 by searching the
> Renesas Website for the SH7705 chip, and looking for the following
> Document:
> SH-3/SH-3E/SH3-DSP Software Manual
See the older japanese gentleman standing next to me in the second
picture in https://lwn.net/Articles/647636/ wearing a red shirt? A
couple decades back, he was the SuperH platform architect. He had
_stories_ about SH3 development, and answered a lot of "why did they do
X" questions. (Not recently, he's moved on to other things. Retired to
California I think? I remember he still considered Microsoft Windows CE
compatibility to be important because it was a big customer back when
sh2 an sh3 were originally developed, so must still be relevant today
because reasons. He made darn sure j-core ran a lot of old Windows CE
binaries circa 2014 or so. *shrug* Mostly before my time. Yay
compatibility testing I suppose.)

Yes, back in the day, wince ran on sh:

  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms882059.aspx

Not currently a development focus of SEI, but if somebody else wanted to
do stuff, it's open...

Rob

P.S. I'm not the expert on any of this, I'm just chatty. I try to keep
up with the mailing list and with what everybody else is doing.  we're
trying to resurface from the last 18 months of crazy, and when we do
I'll see if I can... I dunno, get Jeff to drop into the #j-core irc
channel on freenode for half an hour each week or something. Keep in
mind he's usually in japan so his day is US night.