SHRINK: Reducing the ISA complexity via instruction recycling

Abstract

Microprocessor manufacturers typically keep old instruction sets in modern processors to ensure backward compatibility with legacy software. The introduction of newer extensions to the ISA increases the design complexity of microprocessor front-ends, exacerbates the consumption of precious on-chip resources (e.g., silicon area and energy), and demands more efforts for hardware verification and debugging. We analyzed several x86 applications and operating systems deployed between 1995 and 2012 and observed that many instructions stop being used over time, and more than 500 instructions were never used in these applications. We also investigate the impact of including these unused instructions in the design of the x86 decoders and propose SHRINK, a mechanism to remove old instructions without breaking backward compatibility with legacy code. SHRINK allows us to remove 40% of the instructions from the x86 ISA and improve the critical path, area, and power consumption of the instruction decoder, respectively, by 23%, 48%, and 49%, on average.